In their literature the New Museum states that the focus from their inception has been on new art, new work that falls somewhere between that seen in a grass roots alternative spaces and recent work in museums that shows a correspondence to historical values, or, we might say, that which shows its relationship to the linear progression of western art. For some time I have been attempting to understand contemporary art and while I find this definition vague it is somewhat more helpful than that of the San Francisco Museum of Modern art which defines contemporary art as that created since 1975.
In one of the newspaper commentaries about The New Museum it was stated that there is no interest here in bourgeois art.
Based on these few readings I realized that I would have to define for my own understanding “new” and “bourgeois”.
In every small town in America, and even in the Greenwich Village Outdoor Art Show, one can find art exhibitions featuring classic subjects: landscape, still life, portraiture, and abstraction. Because they are recently made, however, does not make them “new”, but because their appeal is primarily to middle class buyers it does make them pretty much “bourgeois”.
But when considering the art of the twentieth century and especially from the heady days of New York in the 70’s and 80’s where so much art was heavily promoted to upper middle class and wealthy buyers, almost all the artists in uptown museums who have made their livelihood producing commercially successful works with a single signature image might be understood now as bourgeois artists. Those would be the artworks promoted as having historical values, made by artists who have produced work self consciously within the western tradition, and would include Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, de Kooning, Mark Rothko, et al. The art from the first half of the Twentieth Century, when exploration of the nature of the picture space was the primary concern of the artists, can be understood as “new” art, an overview of which we can find in Robert Hughes’ book, The Shock of the New, 1980. But because that art is of the recent past it is of course no longer new and so it is more correctly …Modern.
There is always the disclaimer that the new art is that in which the artist’s vision gives us a new perception of the world around us, whether of the exterior or the interior of that world. In some venues it is claimed that contemporary art gives us the familiar but in new arrangements.
Having had these things under consideration for some time I have come to this conclusion: Traditional western art was existential in that it was concerned with the things of the earth; landscape, still life, and portraiture and their “meaning”. Modern art was expressive of the metaphysical and was concerned with the interior experience and meaning, whether spiritual or psychological. Contemporary art has returned to the existential view that the thing presented is but the thing itself with the difference that it often has no deeper meaning or significance.
In trying to determine if a new artwork is “art” I would think that there should be as well something about the work that indicated that the artist had an art education, or that he understood the fine arts, or that he has mastered the craft of his medium, so that his work is not confused with contemporary folk art or outsider art. (It would also help if we were to attempt to make some distinction between fine art and decoration.) But I don’t know how that would be achieved without referencing historic values. Alfred Barnes says that all great art works have in common a certain quality and I understand him to mean that those works have achieved a degree of excellence in their making. Perhaps that sense of excellence would replace a sense of historic value, or art education.
I suppose there is a need for a museum of new art, although I suspect it is not a really pressing issue. Art is going to change; it always does. It will change because the world changes. And I am convinced that when art changes it will be because an artist has presented works that have a unique form based on his vision. This might very well be art work that is the result of a conscious effort to produce the new: specifically I think of Kurt Schwitters who collected the detritus of a war ravaged society determined to make a new art from it.
Rather than take the reactionary, exclusionary stance of art venues in the past, the New Museum announces that it stands at an open door ready for what is to come. That is their mission statement. But I am not completely convinced that that will be their practice; their architecturally conservative, recently made building seems to indicate that the traditional view of business as usual will likely prevail.
Certainly none of the four artists currently exhibited at this museum represent anything so very new in their work. In fact all of it has the look of second year student work, and from not one of the better art schools.
The most interesting works are those made by Steven Shearer. Mr. Shearer is apparently compulsive about downloading images from the internet. In some works these small color photographs are arranged on large white formats, about four by six or eight feet, in other than rigid patterns but achieving the look, from across the room, of patchwork quilts. On closer view these are not collage but large giclee prints. While I admired the quilt effect I was more interested in the technology than the use made of it.
He has also given us a number of portraits of men with long hair which obscures their faces. Some of these are made in blue ball point pen and have an interest in being a new use of a common marking device, but the draftsmanship does not transcend the art school level of accomplishment. (I suspect some of these are tracings.) In oil paintings of the same subjects there is an implied reach for new color sensibility and combinations but even though the results are other than those of paintings with historical values, they have a too obvious allegiance to prevailing East Village norms.
Artwork made using light is a common experience in every museum of modern, contemporary, and installation art and the work included in this show adds nothing to what has already been seen elsewhere and everywhere. Nor does the two pages of small print explaining the intellectual subtleties of these works or their relationship to the linear progression of western art elevate them to a level of more interest than they first appear to have. Nor do I understand, after the museum’s preface, why I should admire works “in the tradition” when I had been lead to understand that the museum was only interested in works that have other than those concerns.
The small abstract, non representational paintings of Tomma Abts occasioned two observations. One: from a distance her works appear to be merely two dimensional patterns in some interesting color combinations, but on walking closer to them one sees painted shadows and highlights and up close there is a sense of three dimensions, as opposed to more traditional art which has a sense of deep picture space from the aesthetic distance but which on closer view is seen to be merely color applied in daubs, points, or blends.
Secondly, I had first seen these on the internet, courtesy of The New York Times, and I was very taken by the high chromaticity of the colors. In the gallery there is quite the opposite effect: the chroma is much lower and the sense of translucency is completely lacking. If anything the paintings look opaque from having been over worked. They also look as if the making of them had been a very tedious process. (I am not one to confuse tedium with mastery.) They are really on the borderline of the obsessive/compulsive work of outsiders, but not as interesting without that something irrepressible that wants to be said or that something unspeakable that cannot be repressed. I am sometimes shocked by the slap dash presence and finish of Matisse and Picasso’s works but those paintings do have a sense of vibrancy and energy that is totally missing here.
Despite my being not favorably impressed by this work I am appreciative that the artists represented are from four different countries. If the New York art world needs anything it is the breath of fresh air that will come from being less geocentric than it has been for the last fifty years. I truly suspect that what it has self promoted all this long while is nowhere near as important as we have been lead to believe. From that regard this policy of The New Museum is a welcome sign.
http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions
In the meantime, for those with an interest in new art I suggest looking in on two of the best venues in the country; The Blue Star Center of Contemporary Art in San Antonio and the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.
I haven’t yet figured out how to navigate the works posted on the internet here:http://www.bluestarart.org/info.html
Don’t miss the James Turrell work here. He is the present master of using light to make new art. His work at this museum is very inspiring: http://www.mattress.org/index.cfm?event=Exhibitions&c=Permanent
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Morgan Library and Museum The Renzo Piano Expansion
Morgan Library.
In his history of museums, The Museum Age, Germain Bazin, former Curator of the Louvre, tells us that museums came into being because man has been an inveterate collector from his earliest recorded history. Prior to there being museums there were temples with offerings and there were private collections. Collectors who had great pride in their accomplishments and who wanted to share their treasures have almost always opened their collections to the public. When collections were merged and placed in a common building, the museum as we know it was born.
One of the great joys of the New York City art scene is that it has had examples of the spirit of collecting in many manifestations. Of the cabinet, or small personal collection, The Morgan Library and the Frick Collection have been the exemplars.
I made my first visit to the Morgan Library in the early 1960’s. Being an avid reader and a lover of books, I wanted to get some idea where my penchant for buying first editions at Strand Bookstore on 12th Street, for one dollar each in those days, was leading me. The entrance was in the center of the building on the corner of Madison and 36th Street, and one passed through the reception area, now The Marble Court, to a hallway that lead over to the library itself further east along 36th. In that hallway there was a display of some of the artwork from the collection: manuscripts, drawings, and maps. But as I recall, the primary attraction of the venue was the physical library, 1906, which is one of the stellar American examples of reproduction European architecture, Italian Renaissance.
In later years I recall there being a gallery along the backside of the long hallway, then a gallery I had not known about was opened just to the left in the entry building, and somewhat later a new gallery and garden were opened in the space between the two buildings and those buildings on 37th Street. Thus over the years I have seen the Morgan evolve from what I had thought was primarily an architectural entity to a cabinet of antique works.
For several reasons I have been slow about getting in to the City to see all the latest in museum offerings these past few years. I have just now made my first visit to the New Morgan Library and Museum. You will note that the name of the venue has now been extended; the several areas of collecting are now offered as “a small museum”.
The new focus has occasioned a major building reconceptualization as well by the noted international architect, Renzo Piano, who is the undisputed man of the hour in museum reconceptualizations. What he has wrought is lovely but I am sorry to find that this is the direction the project has gone.
In essence Sr. Piano has maintained the two early twentieth century buildings, the library and the annex building, and has removed all of the other additions and reconfigurations, as well as the Morgan House on Madison Avenue, a late nineteenth century brownstone mansion. The brownstone on the corner of Madison and 37th has been left in place.
The space of the former house is now the entry and the whole of the space between the buildings on 36th and 37th has been covered with an International Style structure that encloses Gilbert Court, a piazza, a large communal meeting place. As I have said, this is lovely. However, as with most recent museum rebuilding there appears to be more public space than expanded gallery spaces. The Morgan claims that the exhibition space has been doubled, but not all that much considering the space that is available to them, and there is increased storage space and a concert stage as well.
My criticism of the piazza, the entry, and the two new restaurants, is that I feel they have subsumed the original two buildings and the function of the venue. By shifting the entry to Madison Avenue the buildings on 36th Street are not seen when approaching the museum. As a result the visitor does not carry that image into the interior: their exterior identity, their architectural presence, has been eliminated as well. They now have the presence of historic rooms inside a museum building. In addition and in comparison to the newly defined space both the library and the gallery building now seem small, as indeed, in New York City, they are. The effect is similar to that of the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum in which Ancient Egypt meets the International Style, with the latter holding the winning hand.
But I think the best way to make this understandable is to question why the Morgan thought it needed not one but two restaurants. (Granted, they are both small.) Whereas some museums once offered food in a cafeteria, almost every American museum now boasts of a gourmet dining experience. Despite the claim, in all of these restaurants the food is no better than standard mediocre restaurant fare. (I did not sample the bill of fare here.)
At the most, a visitor to the Morgan needs not more than two hours to see the present offerings. Inviting the public to stay and sit to dinner, at outrageous museum restaurant prices, adds a function and a cost to the concept of the cabinet that eliminates that concept. In a very strong sense the newly defined areas have become the attraction and the original library, galleries, and collections the incidentals.
The sense of this loss of concept can be seen as well in the lower floor where, in a large, open space, in reality the lobby for the concert theatre, (60’s modern, with cherry wood and bright red seats, this concert hall is a fourth design style within the museum), an exhibition of drawings and photographs of the architectural project has been placed on two walls and glass vitrines have been pushed up against two other walls across the large room. These displays look not like planning so much as two after thoughts.
There are two new but extremely small galleries. The Englehard Gallery, on the second floor above the entry, is the larger and might be just the right size for the exhibition I saw there, manuscripts and drawings by, for the most part, contemporary writers. But the Clare Eddy Thaw Gallery, on the first floor is so small as to raise the question, why was it made? As an architectural entity it is “right”: it is a perfect cube resting in the space between the two original buildings. The limited exhibition space that it contains however makes it feel even smaller than it is. (It measures 20 by 20 by 20 feet.) Hence, I suspect its real function is to serve as an architectural screen masking the piazza from the 36th Street view. Making that space a gallery is a good solution as to what to do with a structure once it was there, but as a gallery, it feels decidedly detached. As a result, that enhances the awareness that all of the galleries are now disconnected. This is also emphasized by the fact that, standing in the piazza, it is not readily apparent where the galleries are: even with a plan in hand, one has to ask.
From the architectural perspective, the cube was used because of its reference to the Italian Renaissance estudiolo, a concept I have seen in the petite museum designed by Cesar Pelli at the side of his Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. In both buildings their strongly perceived smallness overcomes the beauty of the geometric purity. On the inside both of these buildings induce claustrophobia. It’s a nice thought but I have yet to see it successfully adapted to modern use.
It has become the accepted wisdom that museums must give evidence of their commitment to growth, that they must change, and that they must have an ever larger plant. Why this is considered wisdom I do not know. Had the Morgan stayed as it was I would have been perfectly happy to continue to see their wonderful exhibitions, exhibitions unlike those offered in any other venue. I consider it a great loss to the museum going public that the example they provided, of the cabinet, has now been eradicated. I thought it had a perfectly legitimate raison d’etre.
Of the architectural details of the covered piazza I was extremely impressed by the simplicity of the essential post and beam construction, (three posts on each of the two sides) and especially by the posts. Some of these rise without interruption from the lower floors to the roof, probably 70 feet or so. And rather than being I-beams or square steel columns the square form has been opened up so that each is four angle irons of ninety degrees with the folded edges touching in the center. That open form lends a sense of lightness and gracefulness to the whole structure.
There are two glass elevators in the piazza for the Engelhard Gallery on the second level, the offices on the third, and the concert hall on the lower floor. The upper spaces are closed to the view from the main floor and the elevators are accessed by platforms that appear to be cantilevered off those walls. Their excitement is augmented by glass parapets. As much as I like these components, in considering the whole of the piazza space, I feel that their presence in that space is intrusive. Had the elevators opened directly into those galleries and offices, their being glass elevators would have provided that sense of excitement. But that would have interrupted the pedestrian flow from the entrance on the lobby floor, it would have necessitated a reconfiguration of the elevator exit in the basement, and so the shift in orientation was made. This has resulted in a dead space behind them between the two restaurants. As they stand the elevators seem either misplaced or gratuitous.
On the exterior I admire that the new entry was painted to match the stone of the older Vermont granite buildings. But I very much disliked the solid surface above the glass entry way. While I admire a blank space, this had a too strong resemblance to those flat surfaces applied in the fifties as remodeling over earlier architectural facades. There are still many examples of this just down the block on 34th Street.
It was nice to see the museum acknowledge the architect with an exhibition giving the history of the institution and with his designs for the new addition. To my knowledge, of all the many new museums built recently in America, only the Museum of Contemporary Art in Fort Worth has exhibited drawings of the architect’s development of the space. Especially noteworthy here is the model of the project made in a Parisian studio. It is one of the great architectural models. It includes all of the various buildings with just enough architectural detail to give it a nice texture without lapsing into a compulsive episode. One reason it works so well is that all of the various stylistic components are rendered in the same honey-colored wood giving the whole a unity that the new museum itself does not have: whereas this is “a model” seen from the outside, the exterior of the Morgan is now seen from only one side and now reads, from the inside, as a central court with “some stone doorways”
A loss of personality is not an enhancement.
The Library and Museum Plan:
http://www.themorgan.org/about/campus.asp
Photographs of the campus:
http://www.themorgan.org/about/press/TEArchitectureImages.pdf
In his history of museums, The Museum Age, Germain Bazin, former Curator of the Louvre, tells us that museums came into being because man has been an inveterate collector from his earliest recorded history. Prior to there being museums there were temples with offerings and there were private collections. Collectors who had great pride in their accomplishments and who wanted to share their treasures have almost always opened their collections to the public. When collections were merged and placed in a common building, the museum as we know it was born.
One of the great joys of the New York City art scene is that it has had examples of the spirit of collecting in many manifestations. Of the cabinet, or small personal collection, The Morgan Library and the Frick Collection have been the exemplars.
I made my first visit to the Morgan Library in the early 1960’s. Being an avid reader and a lover of books, I wanted to get some idea where my penchant for buying first editions at Strand Bookstore on 12th Street, for one dollar each in those days, was leading me. The entrance was in the center of the building on the corner of Madison and 36th Street, and one passed through the reception area, now The Marble Court, to a hallway that lead over to the library itself further east along 36th. In that hallway there was a display of some of the artwork from the collection: manuscripts, drawings, and maps. But as I recall, the primary attraction of the venue was the physical library, 1906, which is one of the stellar American examples of reproduction European architecture, Italian Renaissance.
In later years I recall there being a gallery along the backside of the long hallway, then a gallery I had not known about was opened just to the left in the entry building, and somewhat later a new gallery and garden were opened in the space between the two buildings and those buildings on 37th Street. Thus over the years I have seen the Morgan evolve from what I had thought was primarily an architectural entity to a cabinet of antique works.
For several reasons I have been slow about getting in to the City to see all the latest in museum offerings these past few years. I have just now made my first visit to the New Morgan Library and Museum. You will note that the name of the venue has now been extended; the several areas of collecting are now offered as “a small museum”.
The new focus has occasioned a major building reconceptualization as well by the noted international architect, Renzo Piano, who is the undisputed man of the hour in museum reconceptualizations. What he has wrought is lovely but I am sorry to find that this is the direction the project has gone.
In essence Sr. Piano has maintained the two early twentieth century buildings, the library and the annex building, and has removed all of the other additions and reconfigurations, as well as the Morgan House on Madison Avenue, a late nineteenth century brownstone mansion. The brownstone on the corner of Madison and 37th has been left in place.
The space of the former house is now the entry and the whole of the space between the buildings on 36th and 37th has been covered with an International Style structure that encloses Gilbert Court, a piazza, a large communal meeting place. As I have said, this is lovely. However, as with most recent museum rebuilding there appears to be more public space than expanded gallery spaces. The Morgan claims that the exhibition space has been doubled, but not all that much considering the space that is available to them, and there is increased storage space and a concert stage as well.
My criticism of the piazza, the entry, and the two new restaurants, is that I feel they have subsumed the original two buildings and the function of the venue. By shifting the entry to Madison Avenue the buildings on 36th Street are not seen when approaching the museum. As a result the visitor does not carry that image into the interior: their exterior identity, their architectural presence, has been eliminated as well. They now have the presence of historic rooms inside a museum building. In addition and in comparison to the newly defined space both the library and the gallery building now seem small, as indeed, in New York City, they are. The effect is similar to that of the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum in which Ancient Egypt meets the International Style, with the latter holding the winning hand.
But I think the best way to make this understandable is to question why the Morgan thought it needed not one but two restaurants. (Granted, they are both small.) Whereas some museums once offered food in a cafeteria, almost every American museum now boasts of a gourmet dining experience. Despite the claim, in all of these restaurants the food is no better than standard mediocre restaurant fare. (I did not sample the bill of fare here.)
At the most, a visitor to the Morgan needs not more than two hours to see the present offerings. Inviting the public to stay and sit to dinner, at outrageous museum restaurant prices, adds a function and a cost to the concept of the cabinet that eliminates that concept. In a very strong sense the newly defined areas have become the attraction and the original library, galleries, and collections the incidentals.
The sense of this loss of concept can be seen as well in the lower floor where, in a large, open space, in reality the lobby for the concert theatre, (60’s modern, with cherry wood and bright red seats, this concert hall is a fourth design style within the museum), an exhibition of drawings and photographs of the architectural project has been placed on two walls and glass vitrines have been pushed up against two other walls across the large room. These displays look not like planning so much as two after thoughts.
There are two new but extremely small galleries. The Englehard Gallery, on the second floor above the entry, is the larger and might be just the right size for the exhibition I saw there, manuscripts and drawings by, for the most part, contemporary writers. But the Clare Eddy Thaw Gallery, on the first floor is so small as to raise the question, why was it made? As an architectural entity it is “right”: it is a perfect cube resting in the space between the two original buildings. The limited exhibition space that it contains however makes it feel even smaller than it is. (It measures 20 by 20 by 20 feet.) Hence, I suspect its real function is to serve as an architectural screen masking the piazza from the 36th Street view. Making that space a gallery is a good solution as to what to do with a structure once it was there, but as a gallery, it feels decidedly detached. As a result, that enhances the awareness that all of the galleries are now disconnected. This is also emphasized by the fact that, standing in the piazza, it is not readily apparent where the galleries are: even with a plan in hand, one has to ask.
From the architectural perspective, the cube was used because of its reference to the Italian Renaissance estudiolo, a concept I have seen in the petite museum designed by Cesar Pelli at the side of his Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. In both buildings their strongly perceived smallness overcomes the beauty of the geometric purity. On the inside both of these buildings induce claustrophobia. It’s a nice thought but I have yet to see it successfully adapted to modern use.
It has become the accepted wisdom that museums must give evidence of their commitment to growth, that they must change, and that they must have an ever larger plant. Why this is considered wisdom I do not know. Had the Morgan stayed as it was I would have been perfectly happy to continue to see their wonderful exhibitions, exhibitions unlike those offered in any other venue. I consider it a great loss to the museum going public that the example they provided, of the cabinet, has now been eradicated. I thought it had a perfectly legitimate raison d’etre.
Of the architectural details of the covered piazza I was extremely impressed by the simplicity of the essential post and beam construction, (three posts on each of the two sides) and especially by the posts. Some of these rise without interruption from the lower floors to the roof, probably 70 feet or so. And rather than being I-beams or square steel columns the square form has been opened up so that each is four angle irons of ninety degrees with the folded edges touching in the center. That open form lends a sense of lightness and gracefulness to the whole structure.
There are two glass elevators in the piazza for the Engelhard Gallery on the second level, the offices on the third, and the concert hall on the lower floor. The upper spaces are closed to the view from the main floor and the elevators are accessed by platforms that appear to be cantilevered off those walls. Their excitement is augmented by glass parapets. As much as I like these components, in considering the whole of the piazza space, I feel that their presence in that space is intrusive. Had the elevators opened directly into those galleries and offices, their being glass elevators would have provided that sense of excitement. But that would have interrupted the pedestrian flow from the entrance on the lobby floor, it would have necessitated a reconfiguration of the elevator exit in the basement, and so the shift in orientation was made. This has resulted in a dead space behind them between the two restaurants. As they stand the elevators seem either misplaced or gratuitous.
On the exterior I admire that the new entry was painted to match the stone of the older Vermont granite buildings. But I very much disliked the solid surface above the glass entry way. While I admire a blank space, this had a too strong resemblance to those flat surfaces applied in the fifties as remodeling over earlier architectural facades. There are still many examples of this just down the block on 34th Street.
It was nice to see the museum acknowledge the architect with an exhibition giving the history of the institution and with his designs for the new addition. To my knowledge, of all the many new museums built recently in America, only the Museum of Contemporary Art in Fort Worth has exhibited drawings of the architect’s development of the space. Especially noteworthy here is the model of the project made in a Parisian studio. It is one of the great architectural models. It includes all of the various buildings with just enough architectural detail to give it a nice texture without lapsing into a compulsive episode. One reason it works so well is that all of the various stylistic components are rendered in the same honey-colored wood giving the whole a unity that the new museum itself does not have: whereas this is “a model” seen from the outside, the exterior of the Morgan is now seen from only one side and now reads, from the inside, as a central court with “some stone doorways”
A loss of personality is not an enhancement.
The Library and Museum Plan:
http://www.themorgan.org/about/campus.asp
Photographs of the campus:
http://www.themorgan.org/about/press/TEArchitectureImages.pdf
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Close Encounters Irving Penn Portraits of Artists and Writers at the Morgan Library and Museum
This group of black and white portraits by Irving Penn, purchased in 2007, is this museum’s first acquisition of photographs. Inside the International Style piazza they seem comfortably at home even though they represent a very different area of collecting for the Morgan. Despite photography having been accorded the status of fine art for many years it still only receives token acknowledgement in museums. In these photographs there is great attention to composition, lighting, sharpness of image, and tonal values. These are beautiful, flawless prints. By not elucidating any of this with its first photographic exhibition, the Morgan has missed the perfect opportunity to expand the understanding of the discipline and of its audience.
Most of them were made for Vogue. Because the subjects are famous artists of the mid to late 20th Century, because we can assume that they lead busy lives and that their time was valuable, we are left to infer that these works are important because the subjects considered the photographer to have been a famous artist and person as well.
When we are introduced to a person, or in conversation with another, we make eye contact. When we see a portrait, whether painted or photographed, we immediately make eye contact as well in order to ascertain the character of the person depicted. In viewing portraits this human response can cause us to judge the works by that character as we interpret it, while overlooking them as artworks: it is only when the subject’s eyes are not seen that we can more easily see the whole of the design and the artistry within the format.
I would suspect that Irving Penn agreed with that. It might explain why, once he had placed his subjects in front of his camera, he then waited a good long time before tripping the shutter.
In many of these photographs the subjects have not only relaxed, they have grown weary of the experience. The only thing that seems to keep them in place is their commitment to being photographed. Many of them seem perplexed and to regret that they have agreed to the project. In each of them there is the stillness of the studio in which they were made. Throughout almost all of these portraits there is an almost palpable sense of tedium. When considering: “What is expressed”, that pervasive sense of tedium is found to be stronger than the character of the persons portrayed. It is enhanced by the consistently bland and gray environments. Thus Penn has succeeded in making unusual and disturbing images of persons that overcome the propensity for eye contact. These are not portraits but Photographs Made by Irving Penn in the same way that Picasso’s pen and ink drawing is a drawing by Picasso rather than a portrait of Stravinski.
Each of these persons, as a successful artist, has for the readers of Vogue a recognizable persona. Not everyone with a recognizable public image wants to reveal much more of himself beyond that. By allowing them to just stand there many of them have let go of some degree of that persona: Georgia O’Keefe who, let us not forget, has posed for Stieglitz, seems more impatient and cranky than one might have suspected she could be.
But this is not always the case: Saul Steinberg, seen looking into the camera, into our eyes, is drawing a self portrait and seems absolutely intent on delighting in his artist’s persona every waking moment of his day.
In a double portrait Fredrick Kiesler has grown bored and has bowed his head and turned inwardly to his own thoughts while his companion, William de Kooning, continues to hold his pose with such professionalism and respect that the long ash on his cigarette does not fall. This photograph is initially amusing and disturbing and then, ultimately, neither…there is not enough here to sustain the viewer’s interest. In the brochure the Morgan directs our attention to the cuffs of the shirt sleeves and to a cuff link: my point precisely.
In the photographs in which the subject looks away from the camera the personality of the subject is of no interest to the photographer at all. In an extreme close up Somerset Maugham’s face looks like old meat. It evokes a very visceral response in the viewer. But this seems not so much the concept of the found photograph as purposeful: in the portrait of Louise Bourgeoise the subject is her dry, wrinkled, heavily textured old skin. Only by having placed the light just so could that texture have been emphasized on film.
In that photograph other aspects of Penn’s method become evident. The extreme black of her shoulder, toward the camera, seems not to result from the light having been flagged off the subject in the studio but from manipulation, burning in, in the printing. In the portrait of Phillip Roth in which his neck rises out of his turned up collar, one realizes that his shoulders, which should be seen, are not and a closer examination of the print indicates that they have been blurred into the ground. Whether this was done to the negative, during printing, or to the print I would not know, but it enhances the awareness that in the studio and in the dark room Penn was a man much given to manipulation and control. As those are generally not admirable human qualities, that awareness adds a rather cold and dark layer to these works.
Exploring this aspect of the work one begins to realize that almost all of these photographs lack spontaneity. This is not a photographer who would capture a moment within a movement such as a Frenchman leaping over a puddle. Many are overworked to the point of being contrived. Because contrivance is so deadly and antithetical to art, one begins to question Penn’s technique. Is the too obvious manipulation a stylistic device meant to be seen or is it an excess of which he is unaware? Has the photographer placed himself front and center, as in those works by other artists bearing the title: The Artist and His Model, or has he assumed the central position through the expression of his own egoism?
Jasper Johns is the only subject to appear in two photographs. In the first, 1964, he is a rather bland young man newly arrived to fame. In the second, 2006, he is The Picture of Dorian Gray. While that could be read as the photographer’s interpretation of the subject’s character and life experience, because the composition is so rigid and the lighting so unusual and so controlled, it reads rather as the photographer using the subject in order to make a photograph that defines his stylistic approach in disregard of the subject’s personality. Why then use a person who has name recognition?
In others the camera is so close it distorts the shape of the head. This was not done to better depict the personality of that person but only for the purpose of making a striking image: anyone could have been the subject of those photographs. That the subject and the photographer were celebrities gives the works an importance, to the readers of Vogue, that they would not have if both persons were unknown.
As one of the house organs for the social set, Vogue had a status amongst the initiates that was not shared by those outside that world. To an outsider the world of Vogue was a hybrid world, a world which placed much importance on being seen, in what, and with whom. To the outsider these Vogue photographs would seem to be hybrids without universal significance. Admitting their possibly limited appeal, one questions the status of the photographer: whereas his images seemingly minimize the celebrity status of his subjects, in the end these photographs, made for Vogue, can be seen to have come into existence only because of the celebrity status of all concerned. The shift from portraiture to enigmatic image is only an editorial, stylistic device that establishes that equality.
Considered all together these photographs can be understood as a group portrait of a social class. This world seems cold and uninviting; celebrity is presented as a tedious, trivial, and unenviable attainment. Was that the intention? Were the sitters in agreement with that or has their confidence been betrayed? In many of them I feel it is the latter. It is because of that perceived disrespect that I find these photographs disturbing.
http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/penn.asp
Most of them were made for Vogue. Because the subjects are famous artists of the mid to late 20th Century, because we can assume that they lead busy lives and that their time was valuable, we are left to infer that these works are important because the subjects considered the photographer to have been a famous artist and person as well.
When we are introduced to a person, or in conversation with another, we make eye contact. When we see a portrait, whether painted or photographed, we immediately make eye contact as well in order to ascertain the character of the person depicted. In viewing portraits this human response can cause us to judge the works by that character as we interpret it, while overlooking them as artworks: it is only when the subject’s eyes are not seen that we can more easily see the whole of the design and the artistry within the format.
I would suspect that Irving Penn agreed with that. It might explain why, once he had placed his subjects in front of his camera, he then waited a good long time before tripping the shutter.
In many of these photographs the subjects have not only relaxed, they have grown weary of the experience. The only thing that seems to keep them in place is their commitment to being photographed. Many of them seem perplexed and to regret that they have agreed to the project. In each of them there is the stillness of the studio in which they were made. Throughout almost all of these portraits there is an almost palpable sense of tedium. When considering: “What is expressed”, that pervasive sense of tedium is found to be stronger than the character of the persons portrayed. It is enhanced by the consistently bland and gray environments. Thus Penn has succeeded in making unusual and disturbing images of persons that overcome the propensity for eye contact. These are not portraits but Photographs Made by Irving Penn in the same way that Picasso’s pen and ink drawing is a drawing by Picasso rather than a portrait of Stravinski.
Each of these persons, as a successful artist, has for the readers of Vogue a recognizable persona. Not everyone with a recognizable public image wants to reveal much more of himself beyond that. By allowing them to just stand there many of them have let go of some degree of that persona: Georgia O’Keefe who, let us not forget, has posed for Stieglitz, seems more impatient and cranky than one might have suspected she could be.
But this is not always the case: Saul Steinberg, seen looking into the camera, into our eyes, is drawing a self portrait and seems absolutely intent on delighting in his artist’s persona every waking moment of his day.
In a double portrait Fredrick Kiesler has grown bored and has bowed his head and turned inwardly to his own thoughts while his companion, William de Kooning, continues to hold his pose with such professionalism and respect that the long ash on his cigarette does not fall. This photograph is initially amusing and disturbing and then, ultimately, neither…there is not enough here to sustain the viewer’s interest. In the brochure the Morgan directs our attention to the cuffs of the shirt sleeves and to a cuff link: my point precisely.
In the photographs in which the subject looks away from the camera the personality of the subject is of no interest to the photographer at all. In an extreme close up Somerset Maugham’s face looks like old meat. It evokes a very visceral response in the viewer. But this seems not so much the concept of the found photograph as purposeful: in the portrait of Louise Bourgeoise the subject is her dry, wrinkled, heavily textured old skin. Only by having placed the light just so could that texture have been emphasized on film.
In that photograph other aspects of Penn’s method become evident. The extreme black of her shoulder, toward the camera, seems not to result from the light having been flagged off the subject in the studio but from manipulation, burning in, in the printing. In the portrait of Phillip Roth in which his neck rises out of his turned up collar, one realizes that his shoulders, which should be seen, are not and a closer examination of the print indicates that they have been blurred into the ground. Whether this was done to the negative, during printing, or to the print I would not know, but it enhances the awareness that in the studio and in the dark room Penn was a man much given to manipulation and control. As those are generally not admirable human qualities, that awareness adds a rather cold and dark layer to these works.
Exploring this aspect of the work one begins to realize that almost all of these photographs lack spontaneity. This is not a photographer who would capture a moment within a movement such as a Frenchman leaping over a puddle. Many are overworked to the point of being contrived. Because contrivance is so deadly and antithetical to art, one begins to question Penn’s technique. Is the too obvious manipulation a stylistic device meant to be seen or is it an excess of which he is unaware? Has the photographer placed himself front and center, as in those works by other artists bearing the title: The Artist and His Model, or has he assumed the central position through the expression of his own egoism?
Jasper Johns is the only subject to appear in two photographs. In the first, 1964, he is a rather bland young man newly arrived to fame. In the second, 2006, he is The Picture of Dorian Gray. While that could be read as the photographer’s interpretation of the subject’s character and life experience, because the composition is so rigid and the lighting so unusual and so controlled, it reads rather as the photographer using the subject in order to make a photograph that defines his stylistic approach in disregard of the subject’s personality. Why then use a person who has name recognition?
In others the camera is so close it distorts the shape of the head. This was not done to better depict the personality of that person but only for the purpose of making a striking image: anyone could have been the subject of those photographs. That the subject and the photographer were celebrities gives the works an importance, to the readers of Vogue, that they would not have if both persons were unknown.
As one of the house organs for the social set, Vogue had a status amongst the initiates that was not shared by those outside that world. To an outsider the world of Vogue was a hybrid world, a world which placed much importance on being seen, in what, and with whom. To the outsider these Vogue photographs would seem to be hybrids without universal significance. Admitting their possibly limited appeal, one questions the status of the photographer: whereas his images seemingly minimize the celebrity status of his subjects, in the end these photographs, made for Vogue, can be seen to have come into existence only because of the celebrity status of all concerned. The shift from portraiture to enigmatic image is only an editorial, stylistic device that establishes that equality.
Considered all together these photographs can be understood as a group portrait of a social class. This world seems cold and uninviting; celebrity is presented as a tedious, trivial, and unenviable attainment. Was that the intention? Were the sitters in agreement with that or has their confidence been betrayed? In many of them I feel it is the latter. It is because of that perceived disrespect that I find these photographs disturbing.
http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/penn.asp
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