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.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Henri Cartier Bresson and the Art and Photography of Paris: at the Art Institute of Chicago
Henri Cartier Bresson began his art career studying painting with Andre Lhote and in those early days took up the camera as a means to make notes and to compile documents of the things that interested him. This exhibition presents us with a side by side study of his work and those of his mentors, the intention being to emphasize that he was not an artist working in isolation but one among many who were exploring the meaning and the possibilities in modern art. I understood this exhibition as an attempt to establish his credentials as a serious artist. Having seen it I find that I have quite another understanding: except for his ability to capture the spontaneous, the fleeting moment, seen in juxtaposition to these specific artists he comes off here as merely one among many who lack “the spark of genius” and whose works are perhaps a little too academic and pedestrian.
It is truly remarkable how many early twentieth century artists devoted time in their early careers to an understanding of the technique of cubism. The broad appeal and response to the Picasso/Braque breakthrough validated the importance of their work: it is seminal to the understanding of modern art. And it is a testament to the early 20th Century artists that they understood this from the first prior to it being a required course in the literature, the colleges, and the art schools of that day.
In this exhibition Andre Lhote is represented by several paintings showing us his comprehension of cubism. And while they are nice paintings rendered in his as opposed to the Picasso/Braque palette, as paintings they do not transcend the reference. If anything they are too much more in the art deco tradition. Where Cartier Bresson follows Lhote’s lead, his works too have that same academic character. In the work by the two artists that appears on the web site, I don’t see that the Lhote drawing makes the Cartier Bresson photograph more important or that it elucidates its value. They are merely similar.
Far more interesting are the works by Brassai, 1899-1984. In these the artist has begun with a black and white photograph, he has isolated the various shapes, and then used pen and ink, in a process here described as cliché verre, and with energetic lines he has created a strong sense of movement and of energy. The works indicate that he, better then Lhote, understood cubism intrinsically. The works are spontaneous, clever, and witty…in several the female nude of the photograph has been drawn over and “cubisiced” except for the breast and nipple, obviously for the artist the “holy of holies”.
When Cartier Bresson follows that concept he produces works such as the 1933 “Solerno, Italy”. In that photograph the wall of a building across the frame serves as a ground. A wall to the left and in perspective is another plane as is the shadow cast by that wall across the bottom of the frame. Just off center in the middle of this created space we see a silhouette of a young boy standing near a caisson. The various planes, textures, and tonal values create the image on the surface of a modern art work. The emptiness of the space and the emotional void of the subject references de Chirico, another artist cited here as an influence.
The Cartier Bresson photograph is one of his better known works and anyone who looks at art works would recognize immediately that it has been made in reference to modern art. Thus there is not much new learned in this exhibition except, perhaps, that Brassai is a photographer whose works one wants to know better.
Andre Kertesz, 1894-1985, is a third influence and his work suggests several insights although I am uncertain that these are the insights the museum wanted us to make. In his work we can see that Kertesz worked with a large format camera. As is typical of that medium his works are carefully composed, the lighting, all natural lighting, is carefully considered, and his beautiful prints are “tack sharp”. Comparing his “Paris, a gentleman”, a well dressed man standing in a park setting, to Cartier Bresson’s very similar “Allee du Prado, Marseilles”, the influence is obvious but what is also obvious is that the enlargement from the 35mm negative lacks Kertesz sharpness. In the Kertesz there are areas of flat tonal values whereas in the Cartier Bresson print those similar flat areas show a variation of tonal values because of the grain of the film; it is an area of mottled tone rather than flat color.
With that awareness the same sense of grain and of the soft edges can then be seen in other well known Cartier Bresson works…such as “Hyeres, France” seen also at the Met in the Gilman Collection (see The Gilman Collection below, July 2008). In this the steps and the railing in the foreground are in a softly sharp focus but the bicyclist whizzing by is in a softer focus, as would be expected of an object moving across the front of the lens. In addition to sensing the grain and the 35mm negative in this work, one also begins to question the spontaneity of this composition: did Cartier Bresson acted quickly and photograph something he saw that was about to happen or did he stand on the balcony and have the bicyclist ride back and forth in the street until he felt that he had made the photograph he had conceptualized?
Comparing the effects of the large format camera to those of the 35mm is not to suggest that one is correct and the other not or that one is preferable to the other. It merely bring to mind that the kind of photographs made by each of these different cameras creates a different end product each with its own sense of time and space, the 35mm camera suggesting immediacy, spontaneity, and energy and the larger format cameras suggesting a strong sense of place and the eternal moment. Digital photography somewhat successfully unites those two worlds.
In this exhibition we are shown how modern art has informed modern photography, as if to validate its importance. What I sense lacking in this exhibition is any suggestion that photography is an art form in and of itself and that it is independent of painting. A great photograph is important because it is a photograph, not because it references painting. Henri Cartier Bresson’s work is important because of his quick eye, his quick wit, and his mastery of the craft of photography. If I understand this exhibition correctly, I am somewhat of the opinion that the wrong inferences were made here.
http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/exhibition/cartierbresson
It is truly remarkable how many early twentieth century artists devoted time in their early careers to an understanding of the technique of cubism. The broad appeal and response to the Picasso/Braque breakthrough validated the importance of their work: it is seminal to the understanding of modern art. And it is a testament to the early 20th Century artists that they understood this from the first prior to it being a required course in the literature, the colleges, and the art schools of that day.
In this exhibition Andre Lhote is represented by several paintings showing us his comprehension of cubism. And while they are nice paintings rendered in his as opposed to the Picasso/Braque palette, as paintings they do not transcend the reference. If anything they are too much more in the art deco tradition. Where Cartier Bresson follows Lhote’s lead, his works too have that same academic character. In the work by the two artists that appears on the web site, I don’t see that the Lhote drawing makes the Cartier Bresson photograph more important or that it elucidates its value. They are merely similar.
Far more interesting are the works by Brassai, 1899-1984. In these the artist has begun with a black and white photograph, he has isolated the various shapes, and then used pen and ink, in a process here described as cliché verre, and with energetic lines he has created a strong sense of movement and of energy. The works indicate that he, better then Lhote, understood cubism intrinsically. The works are spontaneous, clever, and witty…in several the female nude of the photograph has been drawn over and “cubisiced” except for the breast and nipple, obviously for the artist the “holy of holies”.
When Cartier Bresson follows that concept he produces works such as the 1933 “Solerno, Italy”. In that photograph the wall of a building across the frame serves as a ground. A wall to the left and in perspective is another plane as is the shadow cast by that wall across the bottom of the frame. Just off center in the middle of this created space we see a silhouette of a young boy standing near a caisson. The various planes, textures, and tonal values create the image on the surface of a modern art work. The emptiness of the space and the emotional void of the subject references de Chirico, another artist cited here as an influence.
The Cartier Bresson photograph is one of his better known works and anyone who looks at art works would recognize immediately that it has been made in reference to modern art. Thus there is not much new learned in this exhibition except, perhaps, that Brassai is a photographer whose works one wants to know better.
Andre Kertesz, 1894-1985, is a third influence and his work suggests several insights although I am uncertain that these are the insights the museum wanted us to make. In his work we can see that Kertesz worked with a large format camera. As is typical of that medium his works are carefully composed, the lighting, all natural lighting, is carefully considered, and his beautiful prints are “tack sharp”. Comparing his “Paris, a gentleman”, a well dressed man standing in a park setting, to Cartier Bresson’s very similar “Allee du Prado, Marseilles”, the influence is obvious but what is also obvious is that the enlargement from the 35mm negative lacks Kertesz sharpness. In the Kertesz there are areas of flat tonal values whereas in the Cartier Bresson print those similar flat areas show a variation of tonal values because of the grain of the film; it is an area of mottled tone rather than flat color.
With that awareness the same sense of grain and of the soft edges can then be seen in other well known Cartier Bresson works…such as “Hyeres, France” seen also at the Met in the Gilman Collection (see The Gilman Collection below, July 2008). In this the steps and the railing in the foreground are in a softly sharp focus but the bicyclist whizzing by is in a softer focus, as would be expected of an object moving across the front of the lens. In addition to sensing the grain and the 35mm negative in this work, one also begins to question the spontaneity of this composition: did Cartier Bresson acted quickly and photograph something he saw that was about to happen or did he stand on the balcony and have the bicyclist ride back and forth in the street until he felt that he had made the photograph he had conceptualized?
Comparing the effects of the large format camera to those of the 35mm is not to suggest that one is correct and the other not or that one is preferable to the other. It merely bring to mind that the kind of photographs made by each of these different cameras creates a different end product each with its own sense of time and space, the 35mm camera suggesting immediacy, spontaneity, and energy and the larger format cameras suggesting a strong sense of place and the eternal moment. Digital photography somewhat successfully unites those two worlds.
In this exhibition we are shown how modern art has informed modern photography, as if to validate its importance. What I sense lacking in this exhibition is any suggestion that photography is an art form in and of itself and that it is independent of painting. A great photograph is important because it is a photograph, not because it references painting. Henri Cartier Bresson’s work is important because of his quick eye, his quick wit, and his mastery of the craft of photography. If I understand this exhibition correctly, I am somewhat of the opinion that the wrong inferences were made here.
http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/exhibition/cartierbresson
Monday, December 22, 2008
Made in Chicago: The LaSalle Photography Collection at The Chicago Cultural Center
Within minutes of entering the gallery I began to realize that I was looking at one of the finest collections of photographs that I had ever seen. Not only was each of the works arresting, there was a consistency of excellence throughout the collection. Referring to the guide and the accompanying book, Chicago Photographs, I learned that this exhibition represented the convergence of two entities: The LaSalle Bank Photography Collection and the Illinois Institute of Technology.
In 1967 Samuel Sax, the president of the then Exchange National Bank, later the LaSalle Bank, and more recently The Bank of America, made the decision to form a collection of photographs for the offices and public areas of the bank in order to bring the presence of fine art to the people. He hired Beaumont Newhall, the curator of the Eastman Kodak Collection, and his wife, the photography critic, Nancy Newhall, to begin the collection. Continued by successive generations this collection now numbers over 5,000 works. One area of that collection is devoted to works made by Chicago photographers and works about Chicago places and the people of the city. Those works form the basis of this exhibition.
In 1937 Laslzo Moholy-Nagy came to Chicago to set up the New Bauhaus/American School of Design, now a part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Following the methods established at the Weimer Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy set up a course of study that sought to educate toward visual literacy. This was not a system through which the students came to understand the possibilities of modern art but through which they learned to use everything of the modern industrial world to create works germane to their epoch. The school was one of the first to include photography as an academic discipline and to teach it as an art form. Harry Callahan, the self-taught Detroit photographer, was hired to be the first instructor of photography.
This exhibition is composed of approximately 150 of those Chicago works made by 60 different photographers. Of those 60, 17 were on the original staff of the Moholy-Nagy school and many of the others are second and third generation students of the earlier students. Hence there is a Chicago School of Photography about which I have known nothing prior to this visit. The photographers from outside Chicago, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, among others, are represented by works that are compatible with this area of the collection.
From the first viewing it can be understood that these photographs are photographs, each is an object in and of itself made through the photographic process: they are works on paper made through the manipulation of light. While there is always a subject and a viewpoint, the whole of the work, including the photographic process, is the essential thing. As a result each of these works has a tremendous presence.
There is also a strong sense of the photographer’s love of place, respect and love for its people, and the energy and joy of working in a creative process. As I become more familiar with Chicago and the work of Chicago artists I am coming to see that this is a hallmark of the work done in that city. There is a purity of local or regional “feeling” that transcends the personal “feeling” of the artist and goes beyond a myopic political and philosophical world view. In many of these works one senses that the photographer is content, and pleased, to be the intermediary between the found experience and the artful communication of that experience through the use of an understanding of photography as an art form.
In 1948 Wayne Miller received a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph The Way of Life of the Northern Negro. Working on the Southside he documented the migration of the Southern Black American population to the industrial north. His portraits, especially “Strike Captain”, are powerful, loving, and respectful without political outrage or indignation. His subjects, the men and women he recorded, will endure because of their strength of character, their commitment to their betterment, and the positive outlook of their expectations. In the record of the Black American experience this is a very decidedly different view compared to what has become the conventional wisdom. These works should have a very much greater public recognition than they do.
Two excellent abstractions by Aaron Siskind stand out. One is merely a painted board on which the heavy layers of white paint have cracked and chipped showing the dark, almost black wood beneath the surface. As a portrait of an aged surface, this photograph has the spontaneity of action painting. In another, an old piece of wood has daubs of either black paint or black glue that create a grid pattern. It is a wonderful contrast of tonal values and textures.
The Harry Callahan works are made with a large format camera…street scenes, portraits, and landscapes…each with the sense of a found photograph. The works are consciously made with a very specific artistic approach, a mature understanding of fine art. They have a deliberately achieved result. Callahan has the most distinctive sense of composition. Yet he maintains a sense of wonder and spontaneity. It is almost as if he consciously set out to see how far removed he could make his work seem to be from a snapshot but still retain the sense of a casual photograph. His works are truly remarkable. Based on the several photographs seen here I would say that Callahan is a major American photographer and I am curious why he does not have higher name recognition. It is possible that I have heard his name but I have no memory of having seen his work before this.
Of the individual works that stand out in this collection:
Scott Fortino. An empty parking lot fronting the lake. In color, it is a study in grays. We see the surface of the cement, the sand beyond, and the gray sky as a flat ground beyond that. On the left the broken pavement creates a jagged black area. On the right an orange plastic construction fencing swirls down the frame. This photograph is utterly simple but its impact is tremendous.
Jason Lazarus. “Inside Calibrini Green”. Calibrini Green was one of the first public housing projects. Contrary to the expectations it became a breeding ground for crime and social decay. It was razed. Just prior to that one of the tenants wrote his life history and experience here in a message on the walls. Lazarus photographed this message. When the building was torn down the message was destroyed and only this photograph documents that history. In its straightforward and quiet way it is the record of a cry of the heart.
Ray Metzker. Composition Philadelphia. A collage of one inch by two and one half inch frames in high-contrast black and white, forms…people, objects…in a rigid grid pattern approximately two by three feet. There is a wonderful design sense at work here. This has the most stunning impact, an all-over design that literally glitters.
Arthur Siegel. Right of Assembly. Shot from high overhead, a very large group of men is a sea of black, gray, and white hats against a ground of black winter coats.
Nathan Keay. Trying to Fit In. A group of four prints of a young man lying on his side and bending from the knee and the waist around the inside and outside corners and some of the furniture within his apartment. A very witty set of photographs.
Joseph Jachna. Two abstractions. Excellent!
Michelle Keim. Lake III. A color coupler print. The lake and the sky, the sky an intense cerulean blue, the lake the same but fades at the bottom to the very deepest blue. The form of the subject matter has been reduced through the extreme manipulation of the color. A real triumph of color.
Jonas Dovydenas. Iron Worker, Chicago, 1969. Seen from the back, a shirtless young man sits on the very end of an I-beam some fifty floors above the street. He is attaching one of the structural members of this new building to another. Beneath and beyond him the grid of the downtown is a ground in a vanishing perspective. This is the male nude in modern art: the human form against a ground of human ingenuity. Excellent.
The book which accompanies the exhibition, Chicago Photographs, 2004, ISBN 09702452-3-8, contains many of these works and many others that are not shown here. Seeing the book and the photographs together it brought to mind once again the value of seeing the actual works. Whereas in the book most of the works are shown in about the same size, in the exhibition we see the size the photographer thought the best for the impact of the work. Thus the Keay set of prints is each about five by seven inches whereas the Michelle Keim portrait of the lake is extremely large, which size helps to further reduce the definition of the subject matter. It is indeed true that size matters and in most cases it can be seen that the photographer’s choice was right. And while the book is beautifully printed all of the prints have the same finish. In the exhibition there is a real difference in the surface finish of the works, again, another of the photographer’s options and choices.
I think an area of concern in our disintegrating national economy, wherein banks are buying other banks, is what is to become of corporate collections when the collecting institution fails. I trust that someone in Chicago is standing by with a bag full of money to buy this collection should it be threatened in the general calamity. This collection has such a distinct personality it would be a real crime to let it be broken up.
The Chicago Cultural Center:
http://egov.cityofchicago.org/city/webportal/portalEntityHomeAction.do?BV_SessionID=@@@@0514323272.1229961646@@@@&BV_EngineID=cccdadefmmhdldicefecelldffhdfho.0&entityName=Cultural+Center&entityNameEnumValue=128
In 1967 Samuel Sax, the president of the then Exchange National Bank, later the LaSalle Bank, and more recently The Bank of America, made the decision to form a collection of photographs for the offices and public areas of the bank in order to bring the presence of fine art to the people. He hired Beaumont Newhall, the curator of the Eastman Kodak Collection, and his wife, the photography critic, Nancy Newhall, to begin the collection. Continued by successive generations this collection now numbers over 5,000 works. One area of that collection is devoted to works made by Chicago photographers and works about Chicago places and the people of the city. Those works form the basis of this exhibition.
In 1937 Laslzo Moholy-Nagy came to Chicago to set up the New Bauhaus/American School of Design, now a part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Following the methods established at the Weimer Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy set up a course of study that sought to educate toward visual literacy. This was not a system through which the students came to understand the possibilities of modern art but through which they learned to use everything of the modern industrial world to create works germane to their epoch. The school was one of the first to include photography as an academic discipline and to teach it as an art form. Harry Callahan, the self-taught Detroit photographer, was hired to be the first instructor of photography.
This exhibition is composed of approximately 150 of those Chicago works made by 60 different photographers. Of those 60, 17 were on the original staff of the Moholy-Nagy school and many of the others are second and third generation students of the earlier students. Hence there is a Chicago School of Photography about which I have known nothing prior to this visit. The photographers from outside Chicago, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, among others, are represented by works that are compatible with this area of the collection.
From the first viewing it can be understood that these photographs are photographs, each is an object in and of itself made through the photographic process: they are works on paper made through the manipulation of light. While there is always a subject and a viewpoint, the whole of the work, including the photographic process, is the essential thing. As a result each of these works has a tremendous presence.
There is also a strong sense of the photographer’s love of place, respect and love for its people, and the energy and joy of working in a creative process. As I become more familiar with Chicago and the work of Chicago artists I am coming to see that this is a hallmark of the work done in that city. There is a purity of local or regional “feeling” that transcends the personal “feeling” of the artist and goes beyond a myopic political and philosophical world view. In many of these works one senses that the photographer is content, and pleased, to be the intermediary between the found experience and the artful communication of that experience through the use of an understanding of photography as an art form.
In 1948 Wayne Miller received a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph The Way of Life of the Northern Negro. Working on the Southside he documented the migration of the Southern Black American population to the industrial north. His portraits, especially “Strike Captain”, are powerful, loving, and respectful without political outrage or indignation. His subjects, the men and women he recorded, will endure because of their strength of character, their commitment to their betterment, and the positive outlook of their expectations. In the record of the Black American experience this is a very decidedly different view compared to what has become the conventional wisdom. These works should have a very much greater public recognition than they do.
Two excellent abstractions by Aaron Siskind stand out. One is merely a painted board on which the heavy layers of white paint have cracked and chipped showing the dark, almost black wood beneath the surface. As a portrait of an aged surface, this photograph has the spontaneity of action painting. In another, an old piece of wood has daubs of either black paint or black glue that create a grid pattern. It is a wonderful contrast of tonal values and textures.
The Harry Callahan works are made with a large format camera…street scenes, portraits, and landscapes…each with the sense of a found photograph. The works are consciously made with a very specific artistic approach, a mature understanding of fine art. They have a deliberately achieved result. Callahan has the most distinctive sense of composition. Yet he maintains a sense of wonder and spontaneity. It is almost as if he consciously set out to see how far removed he could make his work seem to be from a snapshot but still retain the sense of a casual photograph. His works are truly remarkable. Based on the several photographs seen here I would say that Callahan is a major American photographer and I am curious why he does not have higher name recognition. It is possible that I have heard his name but I have no memory of having seen his work before this.
Of the individual works that stand out in this collection:
Scott Fortino. An empty parking lot fronting the lake. In color, it is a study in grays. We see the surface of the cement, the sand beyond, and the gray sky as a flat ground beyond that. On the left the broken pavement creates a jagged black area. On the right an orange plastic construction fencing swirls down the frame. This photograph is utterly simple but its impact is tremendous.
Jason Lazarus. “Inside Calibrini Green”. Calibrini Green was one of the first public housing projects. Contrary to the expectations it became a breeding ground for crime and social decay. It was razed. Just prior to that one of the tenants wrote his life history and experience here in a message on the walls. Lazarus photographed this message. When the building was torn down the message was destroyed and only this photograph documents that history. In its straightforward and quiet way it is the record of a cry of the heart.
Ray Metzker. Composition Philadelphia. A collage of one inch by two and one half inch frames in high-contrast black and white, forms…people, objects…in a rigid grid pattern approximately two by three feet. There is a wonderful design sense at work here. This has the most stunning impact, an all-over design that literally glitters.
Arthur Siegel. Right of Assembly. Shot from high overhead, a very large group of men is a sea of black, gray, and white hats against a ground of black winter coats.
Nathan Keay. Trying to Fit In. A group of four prints of a young man lying on his side and bending from the knee and the waist around the inside and outside corners and some of the furniture within his apartment. A very witty set of photographs.
Joseph Jachna. Two abstractions. Excellent!
Michelle Keim. Lake III. A color coupler print. The lake and the sky, the sky an intense cerulean blue, the lake the same but fades at the bottom to the very deepest blue. The form of the subject matter has been reduced through the extreme manipulation of the color. A real triumph of color.
Jonas Dovydenas. Iron Worker, Chicago, 1969. Seen from the back, a shirtless young man sits on the very end of an I-beam some fifty floors above the street. He is attaching one of the structural members of this new building to another. Beneath and beyond him the grid of the downtown is a ground in a vanishing perspective. This is the male nude in modern art: the human form against a ground of human ingenuity. Excellent.
The book which accompanies the exhibition, Chicago Photographs, 2004, ISBN 09702452-3-8, contains many of these works and many others that are not shown here. Seeing the book and the photographs together it brought to mind once again the value of seeing the actual works. Whereas in the book most of the works are shown in about the same size, in the exhibition we see the size the photographer thought the best for the impact of the work. Thus the Keay set of prints is each about five by seven inches whereas the Michelle Keim portrait of the lake is extremely large, which size helps to further reduce the definition of the subject matter. It is indeed true that size matters and in most cases it can be seen that the photographer’s choice was right. And while the book is beautifully printed all of the prints have the same finish. In the exhibition there is a real difference in the surface finish of the works, again, another of the photographer’s options and choices.
I think an area of concern in our disintegrating national economy, wherein banks are buying other banks, is what is to become of corporate collections when the collecting institution fails. I trust that someone in Chicago is standing by with a bag full of money to buy this collection should it be threatened in the general calamity. This collection has such a distinct personality it would be a real crime to let it be broken up.
The Chicago Cultural Center:
http://egov.cityofchicago.org/city/webportal/portalEntityHomeAction.do?BV_SessionID=@@@@0514323272.1229961646@@@@&BV_EngineID=cccdadefmmhdldicefecelldffhdfho.0&entityName=Cultural+Center&entityNameEnumValue=128
Friday, October 17, 2008
Behind the Words: Portraits by Yousuf Karsh //The Boston Public Library
Karsh I.
I went to Boston expressly to see the career retrospective of the work of Yousuf Karsh at the Museum of Fine Art and discovered upon my arrival that the Boston Public Library was doing a Karsh exhibit as well. Because the work raises several issues, I am discussing my observations in two entries on this blog.
The celebrity photographer.
There are two schools of thought regarding the interpretation of art works. The one holds that the observer should know as much about the artist as is possible and the interests that inform his work. The other simply states that an art work should stand on its own. In this exhibition at the Boston Public Library almost all of the photographs are accompanied by the notes that Karsh made and published with the photographs when they were featured in magazines and in other exhibitions. Thus we might infer that he was encouraging us to follow the first school and to understand him as well as the art works, but in doing so one can not escape the feeling that Karsh is attempting to place himself in the same category of celebrity as his subjects.
Yousuf Karsh was born in Armenia and left that country as a refugee with his parents and siblings, taking up residence in Syria. In his teen years an uncle in Canada sponsored him for immigration and so he went there and became the uncle’s apprentice in his studio photography business. Recognizing that young Karsh had a natural talent for the medium, he secured for him an apprenticeship with John Garo, the Boston photographer. Karsh spent three years in Boston. While there he availed himself of the opportunity to study and read at the Boston Public Library and he visited the MFA to study the history of western art. Late in life he retired to Boston. The photographs in both these exhibitions were gifts made by his wife, Estrelita Karsh, to these two institutions.
From this biographical material it can be understood that the young Karsh, speaking little or no English, learned to use his eyes, to see, when he worked with his uncle, and that with Garo, whose subjects were the socially prominent, he learned to interact with an elite group of socially and politically active persons. From both photographers Karsh learned to organize and run a photography studio. Because he was successful at all of these things it can be understood that he began with a sharp native intelligence, an attribute that might not have been encouraged in his home life as his parents were uneducated peasants.
On his return to Canada Karsh opened a studio in Ottawa and through the encouragement of a friend became involved with an amateur theatrical group, many of the members being local politicians. Eventually he came to the attention of the Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, who used Karsh to photograph important visitors, included in photographs that featured him as well, as a means to promote his tenure of office. It was through this connection, in 1942, that King arranged the sitting with Winston Churchill. That photograph, the definitive image of the World War II leader, thrust Karsh onto the international stage. It is an excellent photographs and it has tremendous presence. From that time forward his subjects were the makers and shapers of the modern world.
Through the notes, the notes and the photographs came to have equal importance: we have not only the presence of the subject but the presence of the photographer as well; Churchill is an important person and, through the anecdote, so is Karsh who made the photograph. While some self promotion is a vital necessity for any artist establishing his career, with Karsh one senses that self promotion had a far greater importance for him than it did for many other artists.
In recognizing the celebrity photographer, the photographer as celebrity, one has to draw a sharp distinction between the work as it is presented and the reputation that the work has achieved through the artist’s manipulation of the press and the public.
In the library exhibition all of the subjects are writers. Almost all of them are men. And all but four of them are wearing coats and ties. That particular form of dress removes these personalities to an earlier historic moment distant from our own. From his involvement with the theatrical group the observer can detect an influence in the dramatic lighting and in the staged mise en scene of many of these photographs. While dramatic lighting is an acceptable stylistic device, in too many of these, the mise en scene lapses into the clichéd. In the corner of what appears to be a library/study, we see a woman, Pearl Buck, sitting at a desk in profile to the camera. Behind her is a window with an open dictionary on a stand between the heavy draperies. Her desk top is cluttered with papers, a pot of pencils, and a desk calendar, suggesting a writer’s desk. In this photograph we are asked to believe that Miss Buck is deeply engaged with the work at hand. But if we step back from the photograph for a moment and study the lighting we have a different understanding.
Despite the opened window at the back with the view of an overcast gray day, which would indicate a diffused ambient lighting, a key light from the right sharply illuminates the face, a second light is at the back of her head, and a third light splays across the books in the bookcase behind her. The artificiality of the setting is augmented by the four light sources here. Thus we can see that this woman is not actually writing but that she is posing in a room that contains an 8 by 10 view camera, lighting equipment, and a photographer and his assistant. All of this intimacy and story telling is contrived.
Why was it contrived? Did Karsh find his subject so conventional as to be utterly boring? (Pearl Buck has the presence here of the president of a small town garden club.) Was it necessary to stage an event in order to salvage her public image as an important writer …or his as an important photographer of famous writers?
I think it can be understood that I consider this a bad photograph. And I was disappointed to find that many of the others were of this same school of thought. Others, Albert Camus, John Osborne, Norman Mailer, J.B. Priestley, are simply common photography studio portraits.
Some of them rise somewhat above that level. The Hemingway depicted is far more sweet, vulnerable, and human than his self projected image ever suggested. And the man, seen against a black ground, is the subject of a photograph that attempts to be nothing more than a photograph. It is a very good one: it has impact, composition, tonal values, texture, and the presence of an intriguing person. Conversely, the Francois Mauriac profile, also against black, a sliver of his head illuminated like a new moon, is a lovely strong image but I don’t know what that concept has to do with his contribution to letters. This could have been anyone with a hooked nose. His portrait of Cousteau, with an equally hooked nose, is a very, very similar photograph. The two photographs seen in the same exhibition diminish one another.
Some of the photographs are wonderful. The George Bernard Shaw portrait is exactly the public image that that man so carefully cultivated…he gave up not an inch of it! The Picasso is Picasso all the way. Both are wonderful photographs. (Did those two ever take a bad photograph?)
But when Karsh is really good, he is brilliant. In a portrait of two women one sits at the right in profile to the camera. Her hands are clasped and rest on a large book on the table before her. Her face conveys an inner peace, her benevolence and her willingness to experience whatever might befall her.
The other woman sits facing the camera but with her head tipped down as if straining to hear what is about to be said. Her right hand hovers above the clasped hands of the other woman. This woman too exudes peace and love but rather than a willingness to experience life her whole thrust is an intense desire to share and to communicate. Thus one is compelled to share and to give, one is compelled to experience and to accept. The dynamic between them is the essence of human interaction.
Against a black ground the two heads, one slightly above the other, are softly illuminated, gentle ovoid spheres. The hands at the left create an energetic but invisible diagonal from lower left to upper right. The bright edge of the book in the bottom left corner insists that it too has value to the composition; it too is a record of the human experience.
The two women could be any two women who have the ability to illustrate this moment. When these two are forgotten, this photograph will still retain its power.
The woman facing the camera is Polly Thompson and her companion, in profile, is Helen Keller.
I say when they are forgotten, because many of these subjects will be forgotten. Shortly after I entered the gallery a young couple, of college age if not college students, strode into the room. She went to the wall to read the introductory comments and he paced off around the room. Soon he shouted to her: “Hey. John F. Kennedy. He’s considered a writer because he wrote one book?” A few minutes later he laughed. “Wow. Winston Churchill. What the hell does he have to do with literature?” And as quickly he said: “This sucks. Let’s go.” She moved away from the comments and looked at a few of the photographs. She smiled. He kissed her and made much fuss over her. Arms wrapped about one another they breezed out to the room.
Oh, yes, considering the state of American education, these men and these few women will someday be forgotten. And I suspect that very few of these photographs and the anecdotes that accompany them will make an uneducated public curious to know who they were. These are rather dull men and women from another era in photographs presented in a style that is equally passé. As a person Yousuf Karsh was known to be charming, intelligent, ambitious, and completely professional in his working methods, but through his work we can see that he understood Art as something that was Deadly Serious. Despite their being portraits these photographs lack a human quality. He made some fine photographs, but I would say that overall these have historic rather than artistic value.
http://www.bpl.org/news/upcomingevents.htm#exhibits
I went to Boston expressly to see the career retrospective of the work of Yousuf Karsh at the Museum of Fine Art and discovered upon my arrival that the Boston Public Library was doing a Karsh exhibit as well. Because the work raises several issues, I am discussing my observations in two entries on this blog.
The celebrity photographer.
There are two schools of thought regarding the interpretation of art works. The one holds that the observer should know as much about the artist as is possible and the interests that inform his work. The other simply states that an art work should stand on its own. In this exhibition at the Boston Public Library almost all of the photographs are accompanied by the notes that Karsh made and published with the photographs when they were featured in magazines and in other exhibitions. Thus we might infer that he was encouraging us to follow the first school and to understand him as well as the art works, but in doing so one can not escape the feeling that Karsh is attempting to place himself in the same category of celebrity as his subjects.
Yousuf Karsh was born in Armenia and left that country as a refugee with his parents and siblings, taking up residence in Syria. In his teen years an uncle in Canada sponsored him for immigration and so he went there and became the uncle’s apprentice in his studio photography business. Recognizing that young Karsh had a natural talent for the medium, he secured for him an apprenticeship with John Garo, the Boston photographer. Karsh spent three years in Boston. While there he availed himself of the opportunity to study and read at the Boston Public Library and he visited the MFA to study the history of western art. Late in life he retired to Boston. The photographs in both these exhibitions were gifts made by his wife, Estrelita Karsh, to these two institutions.
From this biographical material it can be understood that the young Karsh, speaking little or no English, learned to use his eyes, to see, when he worked with his uncle, and that with Garo, whose subjects were the socially prominent, he learned to interact with an elite group of socially and politically active persons. From both photographers Karsh learned to organize and run a photography studio. Because he was successful at all of these things it can be understood that he began with a sharp native intelligence, an attribute that might not have been encouraged in his home life as his parents were uneducated peasants.
On his return to Canada Karsh opened a studio in Ottawa and through the encouragement of a friend became involved with an amateur theatrical group, many of the members being local politicians. Eventually he came to the attention of the Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, who used Karsh to photograph important visitors, included in photographs that featured him as well, as a means to promote his tenure of office. It was through this connection, in 1942, that King arranged the sitting with Winston Churchill. That photograph, the definitive image of the World War II leader, thrust Karsh onto the international stage. It is an excellent photographs and it has tremendous presence. From that time forward his subjects were the makers and shapers of the modern world.
Through the notes, the notes and the photographs came to have equal importance: we have not only the presence of the subject but the presence of the photographer as well; Churchill is an important person and, through the anecdote, so is Karsh who made the photograph. While some self promotion is a vital necessity for any artist establishing his career, with Karsh one senses that self promotion had a far greater importance for him than it did for many other artists.
In recognizing the celebrity photographer, the photographer as celebrity, one has to draw a sharp distinction between the work as it is presented and the reputation that the work has achieved through the artist’s manipulation of the press and the public.
In the library exhibition all of the subjects are writers. Almost all of them are men. And all but four of them are wearing coats and ties. That particular form of dress removes these personalities to an earlier historic moment distant from our own. From his involvement with the theatrical group the observer can detect an influence in the dramatic lighting and in the staged mise en scene of many of these photographs. While dramatic lighting is an acceptable stylistic device, in too many of these, the mise en scene lapses into the clichéd. In the corner of what appears to be a library/study, we see a woman, Pearl Buck, sitting at a desk in profile to the camera. Behind her is a window with an open dictionary on a stand between the heavy draperies. Her desk top is cluttered with papers, a pot of pencils, and a desk calendar, suggesting a writer’s desk. In this photograph we are asked to believe that Miss Buck is deeply engaged with the work at hand. But if we step back from the photograph for a moment and study the lighting we have a different understanding.
Despite the opened window at the back with the view of an overcast gray day, which would indicate a diffused ambient lighting, a key light from the right sharply illuminates the face, a second light is at the back of her head, and a third light splays across the books in the bookcase behind her. The artificiality of the setting is augmented by the four light sources here. Thus we can see that this woman is not actually writing but that she is posing in a room that contains an 8 by 10 view camera, lighting equipment, and a photographer and his assistant. All of this intimacy and story telling is contrived.
Why was it contrived? Did Karsh find his subject so conventional as to be utterly boring? (Pearl Buck has the presence here of the president of a small town garden club.) Was it necessary to stage an event in order to salvage her public image as an important writer …or his as an important photographer of famous writers?
I think it can be understood that I consider this a bad photograph. And I was disappointed to find that many of the others were of this same school of thought. Others, Albert Camus, John Osborne, Norman Mailer, J.B. Priestley, are simply common photography studio portraits.
Some of them rise somewhat above that level. The Hemingway depicted is far more sweet, vulnerable, and human than his self projected image ever suggested. And the man, seen against a black ground, is the subject of a photograph that attempts to be nothing more than a photograph. It is a very good one: it has impact, composition, tonal values, texture, and the presence of an intriguing person. Conversely, the Francois Mauriac profile, also against black, a sliver of his head illuminated like a new moon, is a lovely strong image but I don’t know what that concept has to do with his contribution to letters. This could have been anyone with a hooked nose. His portrait of Cousteau, with an equally hooked nose, is a very, very similar photograph. The two photographs seen in the same exhibition diminish one another.
Some of the photographs are wonderful. The George Bernard Shaw portrait is exactly the public image that that man so carefully cultivated…he gave up not an inch of it! The Picasso is Picasso all the way. Both are wonderful photographs. (Did those two ever take a bad photograph?)
But when Karsh is really good, he is brilliant. In a portrait of two women one sits at the right in profile to the camera. Her hands are clasped and rest on a large book on the table before her. Her face conveys an inner peace, her benevolence and her willingness to experience whatever might befall her.
The other woman sits facing the camera but with her head tipped down as if straining to hear what is about to be said. Her right hand hovers above the clasped hands of the other woman. This woman too exudes peace and love but rather than a willingness to experience life her whole thrust is an intense desire to share and to communicate. Thus one is compelled to share and to give, one is compelled to experience and to accept. The dynamic between them is the essence of human interaction.
Against a black ground the two heads, one slightly above the other, are softly illuminated, gentle ovoid spheres. The hands at the left create an energetic but invisible diagonal from lower left to upper right. The bright edge of the book in the bottom left corner insists that it too has value to the composition; it too is a record of the human experience.
The two women could be any two women who have the ability to illustrate this moment. When these two are forgotten, this photograph will still retain its power.
The woman facing the camera is Polly Thompson and her companion, in profile, is Helen Keller.
I say when they are forgotten, because many of these subjects will be forgotten. Shortly after I entered the gallery a young couple, of college age if not college students, strode into the room. She went to the wall to read the introductory comments and he paced off around the room. Soon he shouted to her: “Hey. John F. Kennedy. He’s considered a writer because he wrote one book?” A few minutes later he laughed. “Wow. Winston Churchill. What the hell does he have to do with literature?” And as quickly he said: “This sucks. Let’s go.” She moved away from the comments and looked at a few of the photographs. She smiled. He kissed her and made much fuss over her. Arms wrapped about one another they breezed out to the room.
Oh, yes, considering the state of American education, these men and these few women will someday be forgotten. And I suspect that very few of these photographs and the anecdotes that accompany them will make an uneducated public curious to know who they were. These are rather dull men and women from another era in photographs presented in a style that is equally passé. As a person Yousuf Karsh was known to be charming, intelligent, ambitious, and completely professional in his working methods, but through his work we can see that he understood Art as something that was Deadly Serious. Despite their being portraits these photographs lack a human quality. He made some fine photographs, but I would say that overall these have historic rather than artistic value.
http://www.bpl.org/news/upcomingevents.htm#exhibits
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Karsh 100: A Biography in Images. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Karsh II.
At the entry to the Karsh exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts there is an eight by ten view camera on a tripod and on the wall beside it a photograph of Yousef Karsh holding an eight by ten negative to the light. The camera is one that Karsh used and so the museum visitor is given a graphic image of the size of the negatives and the camera lens used to make the many photographs in this career retrospective.
One of the most impressive attributes of the large format camera is its ability to render detail with great clarity. With a sharp focus, correct exposure, slow film with a fine grain, and good studio lighting, the resulting photographs will almost always have a very professional look to them regardless of the expertise of the photographer to capture the Character of his subjects.
Karsh certainly knew how to use the large format camera. He consistently released the shutter at exactly the right moment; with an eight by ten negative one does not run off 300 shots in fifteen minutes and hope for the best …one makes the photograph when he sees it. But in looking at these photographs, and I saw this exhibit on two separate occasions and twice on both visits, I am not at all convinced the he was a fine art photographer. He certainly was not a master of lighting. And I am not always convinced that he successfully depicted character rather than the subject’s well known public image.
The photograph of Albert Schweitzer with his head slightly lowered and his eyes cast down is a remarkable photograph of the hair on his head, in his moustache, and the lines and pores of his aging face. It is a graphic depiction of The Aged, but I don’t understand it as a portrait of Albert Schweitzer …I have read two of his books and his biography. As it regards Albert Schweitzer this photograph only tells me that he grew old.
In her biography, The Life of Yousef Karsh, Maria Tippett reports that Karsh was unhappy with his trip to Hollywood to photograph the stars because most of them, personalities manufactured through the studio system, never relinquished their manufactured images; Humphrey Bogart was always Humphrey Bogart in front of a camera, as was Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Lorre, and all of the others. Those photographs are included in this retrospective and we can see that Ms. Tippett was correct. Unfortunately the museum does not explain the photographer’s unhappiness with these photographs and so many visitors are likely to think that they are good photographs. They are not. They are run of the mill, the Hollywood mill, and Karsh knew that. It says something about the cultivation of his own celebrity status, however, that he continued to allow these to be publically exhibited.
Overall this all inclusive retrospective shows us that Karsh had access to all of the major personalities of the mid twentieth century from movie stars to statesmen, to scientists and writers, and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Regardless of their work, each of them is a recognizable personality. With only a very few persons does he offer us something more than is usually shown.
In particular his photograph of the very young Fidel Castro is quite revealing. His face cropped close to the edges he stares directly at us. He burns with ambition, energy, ideas, and dreams. I have known this face through photographs for fifty years now. I lived in Miami the year he took over the Cuban government. And based on his public image and his coverage in the American press, I have never before sensed what a charismatic and inspiring personality he was…or as he is presented here. Which, I wonder, is the real man?
By contrast, that same winter I worked for over a month on a theatrical production written and directed by Tennessee Williams. I socialized with him on a number of occasions. I hardly recognized him from the photograph here taken only three years before I knew him. Karsh has placed him in a clichéd setting, the disheveled alcoholic author in a frenzy of work, manuscript, cigarette, and scotch and soda close at hand. Here he looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Even in his cups it was my experience that Tennessee Williams always comported himself like the southern gentleman that he was. He was always at a step removed from every situation, he was always the observer. I find the character of the man depicted in this photograph to be untrue.
In some of the earliest works we can see the photographs Karsh made working with an amateur theatrical group in Canada. Each of these photographs is staged but captures a moment of the drama. The influence of stage lighting and set design on his work is apparent. It can be seen that he used that sense of dramatic lighting in most of his portraits. But that does not always work for him. His lighting is often heavy handed. His works are not luminous; the light does not illuminate so much as it “hits” the subject. Often it disrupts the balance of values, as when the key is too high. And the lighting set up is too often merely routine …key, fill, background and always from the same angles in photograph after photograph. There is rarely a sense in his work that the subject and setting called for an individual resolution of the problems encountered, when it does, usually when there was no electrical outlet for his lights, it is available light and it seems it is always from the right.
Later in his career Karsh accepted some commissions to photograph various towns in Canada. I see nothing in these that I have not seen elsewhere. The photographs of his travels with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen are utterly mundane.
But I do see something I would not have expected to find in his photographs made in the factories for Ford of Canada. In both the photographs shown, Gow Crapper installing the back window of a car, and Terry Wasyke and Marris Lehoux in discussion with one holding the nozzle of a spray gun, there is a very high pitch of homoeroticism: Terry and Marris look as if they are about to get to it. Beyond that sudden sexual intrusion into his work, completely lacking in all of his other work including two female nudes, these photographs stand out because they are both so beside the point of the assignment.
As is the photograph in a paper factory in which one of the workers has climbed up onto the center of a huge, about forty by one hundred feet, roll of white paper in order to take his lunch, a la Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. The contrivance here is so obvious and the whole of it is so beside the point, I can’t imagine why it would have been made or why it continues to be shown.
Despite the fact that many of these are nice pictures, and a few of them perhaps great …Churchill, Picasso, Helen Keller, Shaw, Hemingway, and Pablo Casals, most of these are simply common .
As for seeing them, in this installation the MFA has made that almost impossible. Except for one color photograph all of these are black and white, many with black grounds. All have wide white mattes and black museum frames. The lighting is from high overhead and there is a high level of light in the gallery. As a result the glass over the photographs often acts as mirrors and so one sees himself looking at the photographs. I considered at one point making a photograph of this layered experience which would include the photographer, the subject, the photograph and the viewer. While the lighting at the library is not much better, there the photographs are illuminated with small fluorescent lights above each photograph, the library installation is by far the better of the two.
But the final insult in this gallery is a television interview with Karsh that runs over and over again as one moves about the room. In most museums these audio components have ear phones so that the visitors can proceed in silence. Going to the attendant to tell him how annoying I thought that was he stood up straight and stared at me “How do you think I feel: I have to stand here all day and listen to it!” Yes, the economy may have gone south but at least the Bush administration has been successful with their policy of a trickle down abrogation of personal responsibility.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
http://www.mfa.org/master/sub.asp?key=1854&subkey=7143
At the entry to the Karsh exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts there is an eight by ten view camera on a tripod and on the wall beside it a photograph of Yousef Karsh holding an eight by ten negative to the light. The camera is one that Karsh used and so the museum visitor is given a graphic image of the size of the negatives and the camera lens used to make the many photographs in this career retrospective.
One of the most impressive attributes of the large format camera is its ability to render detail with great clarity. With a sharp focus, correct exposure, slow film with a fine grain, and good studio lighting, the resulting photographs will almost always have a very professional look to them regardless of the expertise of the photographer to capture the Character of his subjects.
Karsh certainly knew how to use the large format camera. He consistently released the shutter at exactly the right moment; with an eight by ten negative one does not run off 300 shots in fifteen minutes and hope for the best …one makes the photograph when he sees it. But in looking at these photographs, and I saw this exhibit on two separate occasions and twice on both visits, I am not at all convinced the he was a fine art photographer. He certainly was not a master of lighting. And I am not always convinced that he successfully depicted character rather than the subject’s well known public image.
The photograph of Albert Schweitzer with his head slightly lowered and his eyes cast down is a remarkable photograph of the hair on his head, in his moustache, and the lines and pores of his aging face. It is a graphic depiction of The Aged, but I don’t understand it as a portrait of Albert Schweitzer …I have read two of his books and his biography. As it regards Albert Schweitzer this photograph only tells me that he grew old.
In her biography, The Life of Yousef Karsh, Maria Tippett reports that Karsh was unhappy with his trip to Hollywood to photograph the stars because most of them, personalities manufactured through the studio system, never relinquished their manufactured images; Humphrey Bogart was always Humphrey Bogart in front of a camera, as was Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Lorre, and all of the others. Those photographs are included in this retrospective and we can see that Ms. Tippett was correct. Unfortunately the museum does not explain the photographer’s unhappiness with these photographs and so many visitors are likely to think that they are good photographs. They are not. They are run of the mill, the Hollywood mill, and Karsh knew that. It says something about the cultivation of his own celebrity status, however, that he continued to allow these to be publically exhibited.
Overall this all inclusive retrospective shows us that Karsh had access to all of the major personalities of the mid twentieth century from movie stars to statesmen, to scientists and writers, and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Regardless of their work, each of them is a recognizable personality. With only a very few persons does he offer us something more than is usually shown.
In particular his photograph of the very young Fidel Castro is quite revealing. His face cropped close to the edges he stares directly at us. He burns with ambition, energy, ideas, and dreams. I have known this face through photographs for fifty years now. I lived in Miami the year he took over the Cuban government. And based on his public image and his coverage in the American press, I have never before sensed what a charismatic and inspiring personality he was…or as he is presented here. Which, I wonder, is the real man?
By contrast, that same winter I worked for over a month on a theatrical production written and directed by Tennessee Williams. I socialized with him on a number of occasions. I hardly recognized him from the photograph here taken only three years before I knew him. Karsh has placed him in a clichéd setting, the disheveled alcoholic author in a frenzy of work, manuscript, cigarette, and scotch and soda close at hand. Here he looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Even in his cups it was my experience that Tennessee Williams always comported himself like the southern gentleman that he was. He was always at a step removed from every situation, he was always the observer. I find the character of the man depicted in this photograph to be untrue.
In some of the earliest works we can see the photographs Karsh made working with an amateur theatrical group in Canada. Each of these photographs is staged but captures a moment of the drama. The influence of stage lighting and set design on his work is apparent. It can be seen that he used that sense of dramatic lighting in most of his portraits. But that does not always work for him. His lighting is often heavy handed. His works are not luminous; the light does not illuminate so much as it “hits” the subject. Often it disrupts the balance of values, as when the key is too high. And the lighting set up is too often merely routine …key, fill, background and always from the same angles in photograph after photograph. There is rarely a sense in his work that the subject and setting called for an individual resolution of the problems encountered, when it does, usually when there was no electrical outlet for his lights, it is available light and it seems it is always from the right.
Later in his career Karsh accepted some commissions to photograph various towns in Canada. I see nothing in these that I have not seen elsewhere. The photographs of his travels with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen are utterly mundane.
But I do see something I would not have expected to find in his photographs made in the factories for Ford of Canada. In both the photographs shown, Gow Crapper installing the back window of a car, and Terry Wasyke and Marris Lehoux in discussion with one holding the nozzle of a spray gun, there is a very high pitch of homoeroticism: Terry and Marris look as if they are about to get to it. Beyond that sudden sexual intrusion into his work, completely lacking in all of his other work including two female nudes, these photographs stand out because they are both so beside the point of the assignment.
As is the photograph in a paper factory in which one of the workers has climbed up onto the center of a huge, about forty by one hundred feet, roll of white paper in order to take his lunch, a la Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. The contrivance here is so obvious and the whole of it is so beside the point, I can’t imagine why it would have been made or why it continues to be shown.
Despite the fact that many of these are nice pictures, and a few of them perhaps great …Churchill, Picasso, Helen Keller, Shaw, Hemingway, and Pablo Casals, most of these are simply common .
As for seeing them, in this installation the MFA has made that almost impossible. Except for one color photograph all of these are black and white, many with black grounds. All have wide white mattes and black museum frames. The lighting is from high overhead and there is a high level of light in the gallery. As a result the glass over the photographs often acts as mirrors and so one sees himself looking at the photographs. I considered at one point making a photograph of this layered experience which would include the photographer, the subject, the photograph and the viewer. While the lighting at the library is not much better, there the photographs are illuminated with small fluorescent lights above each photograph, the library installation is by far the better of the two.
But the final insult in this gallery is a television interview with Karsh that runs over and over again as one moves about the room. In most museums these audio components have ear phones so that the visitors can proceed in silence. Going to the attendant to tell him how annoying I thought that was he stood up straight and stared at me “How do you think I feel: I have to stand here all day and listen to it!” Yes, the economy may have gone south but at least the Bush administration has been successful with their policy of a trickle down abrogation of personal responsibility.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
http://www.mfa.org/master/sub.asp?key=1854&subkey=7143
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Flashes of Inspiration: The Work of Harold Edgerton //The Edgerton Center at MIT
Serendipity is a wonderful thing.
Laden with maps, a printed guide for a walking tour of the MIT campus, and with directions and brochures for five art galleries, as well as the MIT Museum, I set off on a picture perfect autumn day to study the architecture and art of this highly esteemed institution.
At the museum I discovered a very large exhibition of the work of Harold Edgerton and, at the end of the day, the last item on the printed walking tour directed me to the fourth floor of the main campus building to the Edgerton Center, a hallway with a permanent installation featuring photographs, equipment he had designed, and practical experiments set up to entice university students into this fascinating area of science.
While Harold Edgerton did not invent the strobe, which dates to 1832, he was the first to apply the idea of the strobe to photography, in order to study machinery in a working state, and in the process he invented the electronic flash and high speed photography, some of his exposures being 1/10,000th of a second. Most of us might not know his name but we do know his photography; the bullet stopped in the air after having blasted through an apple, a hummingbird in arrested flight, a man swinging a golf club, a foot on the moment of impact against a football, etc. He contributed significantly to underwater photography, earning the nickname from Jacques Cousteau, “Papa Flash”, he helped develop sonar imagining as well as night photography, which was used in World War II and which earned him a Medal of Freedom.
I can’t say that seeing the various pieces of equipment, most of which are sealed up containers, made much of an impression on me. But the photographs evoked the pleasure of running into old friends: we all know these photographs from Life and National Geographic magazines. These are photographs unlike any others and I was suddenly aware that they do present the effect that is so often claimed for art but rarely achieved and that is a new view of the commonplace in the world around us. They are fascinating because of what we are seeing… for the first time in a particular way. And in looking at them as art works with good composition, excellent black and white values, and with strong visual impact, it came to my awareness that these scientific exercises very successfully achieved the stature of fine art. As if to cap off that statement and that perception, each of them is an excellent print.
Having that feeling of an encounter with old friends in the Museum, in the hallway I realized that the rooms along the hallway were the actual laboratories where Edgerton and his colleagues worked. Looking into those rooms and seeing the work tables, work benches, and shelves lined with mechanical objects both finished and in parts, and his successors still at work, I felt “at the center of” and very much a part of the process. And I believe that is the intention of this hallway installation. Apparently these labs and these work rooms are open to any student wanting to explore an idea or to use the equipment to manifest a concept. With that realization there came to me a rush of exhilaration of the freedom of inquiry and the wholehearted support of others who have gone that way before. This was such a great distinction from what can be so often the sense of an intensely private place of jealously guarded secrets.
This sense of welcome collaboration and the sharing of intellectual experience so evident here greatly enhanced my understanding of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: there is no elitism at MIT: the doors are open to the curious student and the buildings are open to the interested visitor.
As it regards the fine arts and other museums, I was left to wonder why other institutions that are described as dedicated to the human experience very rarely evoke this same spontaneous and joyful sense of communion. My visit to these two galleries has altered my perception as to what contemporary art should be: it should be about the world in which we are participants and not about the private language of an art world that is distant, foreign, and closed to the rest of us.
Using this link you can get a glimpse of the hallway.
http://web.mit.edu/Edgerton/
The link to the MIT Museum exhibition:
http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/edgerton.html
Using this Wikipedia link you can find other examples of Edgerton’s photographs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Edgerton
Unfortunately none of these links include the photograph of Stonehenge silhouetted against the black night sky, its center illuminated by an electronic flash emitted from an airplane passing overhead. I can’t imagine how that was all coordinated. But it is a magnificent photograph. You’ll have to go to Boston to see it. The MIT Visitor’s Center is to the right of the entrance at 77 Massachusetts Avenue.
Laden with maps, a printed guide for a walking tour of the MIT campus, and with directions and brochures for five art galleries, as well as the MIT Museum, I set off on a picture perfect autumn day to study the architecture and art of this highly esteemed institution.
At the museum I discovered a very large exhibition of the work of Harold Edgerton and, at the end of the day, the last item on the printed walking tour directed me to the fourth floor of the main campus building to the Edgerton Center, a hallway with a permanent installation featuring photographs, equipment he had designed, and practical experiments set up to entice university students into this fascinating area of science.
While Harold Edgerton did not invent the strobe, which dates to 1832, he was the first to apply the idea of the strobe to photography, in order to study machinery in a working state, and in the process he invented the electronic flash and high speed photography, some of his exposures being 1/10,000th of a second. Most of us might not know his name but we do know his photography; the bullet stopped in the air after having blasted through an apple, a hummingbird in arrested flight, a man swinging a golf club, a foot on the moment of impact against a football, etc. He contributed significantly to underwater photography, earning the nickname from Jacques Cousteau, “Papa Flash”, he helped develop sonar imagining as well as night photography, which was used in World War II and which earned him a Medal of Freedom.
I can’t say that seeing the various pieces of equipment, most of which are sealed up containers, made much of an impression on me. But the photographs evoked the pleasure of running into old friends: we all know these photographs from Life and National Geographic magazines. These are photographs unlike any others and I was suddenly aware that they do present the effect that is so often claimed for art but rarely achieved and that is a new view of the commonplace in the world around us. They are fascinating because of what we are seeing… for the first time in a particular way. And in looking at them as art works with good composition, excellent black and white values, and with strong visual impact, it came to my awareness that these scientific exercises very successfully achieved the stature of fine art. As if to cap off that statement and that perception, each of them is an excellent print.
Having that feeling of an encounter with old friends in the Museum, in the hallway I realized that the rooms along the hallway were the actual laboratories where Edgerton and his colleagues worked. Looking into those rooms and seeing the work tables, work benches, and shelves lined with mechanical objects both finished and in parts, and his successors still at work, I felt “at the center of” and very much a part of the process. And I believe that is the intention of this hallway installation. Apparently these labs and these work rooms are open to any student wanting to explore an idea or to use the equipment to manifest a concept. With that realization there came to me a rush of exhilaration of the freedom of inquiry and the wholehearted support of others who have gone that way before. This was such a great distinction from what can be so often the sense of an intensely private place of jealously guarded secrets.
This sense of welcome collaboration and the sharing of intellectual experience so evident here greatly enhanced my understanding of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: there is no elitism at MIT: the doors are open to the curious student and the buildings are open to the interested visitor.
As it regards the fine arts and other museums, I was left to wonder why other institutions that are described as dedicated to the human experience very rarely evoke this same spontaneous and joyful sense of communion. My visit to these two galleries has altered my perception as to what contemporary art should be: it should be about the world in which we are participants and not about the private language of an art world that is distant, foreign, and closed to the rest of us.
Using this link you can get a glimpse of the hallway.
http://web.mit.edu/Edgerton/
The link to the MIT Museum exhibition:
http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/edgerton.html
Using this Wikipedia link you can find other examples of Edgerton’s photographs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Edgerton
Unfortunately none of these links include the photograph of Stonehenge silhouetted against the black night sky, its center illuminated by an electronic flash emitted from an airplane passing overhead. I can’t imagine how that was all coordinated. But it is a magnificent photograph. You’ll have to go to Boston to see it. The MIT Visitor’s Center is to the right of the entrance at 77 Massachusetts Avenue.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Home Delivery. Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. MOMA, NYC
Prior to attending Peter Christensen’s noon talk at the Museum of Modern Art regarding this exhibition, I spent about an hour on the 6th floor looking at the works presented. Following his talk he asked if there were comments or questions and while I had notes, actually subjects that I had jotted down, my mind had not yet formed the material into a sustainable dialogue and so I did not bring them up.
These were my notes:
The current commercial success of modular homes in America…factory made log home kits…post and beam timber kits…teepees…yurts…bamboo.
From the review of the exhibition in The New York Review of Books, I had understood that this was a thorough presentation of the history of prefabricated housing. After spending an hour with the material and an hour at the talk, I found that I disagreed with that appraisal. Following the talk I spent another hour in the gallery and about fifteen minutes with the five projects on the adjacent lot. My opinion remained unchanged.
Taking the nomadic culture of early human communities into consideration, modular housing is one of the oldest of human artifacts. To confine an overview of the subject to the past 180 years and focus exclusively on the West, denies the full range of that history and very likely omits some concepts and practices that might be useful to modern architects who have that area as an interest. There is also a noticeable omission in this exhibition of the state sponsored building that has been erected by the Soviet Union, China, (where vast cities have been built for enormous populations), as well as in India and Latin America. Many of those projects were erected using modular units.
Considering all of these omissions it became clear that the work presented has a reference to low or middle income housing in the industrialized west, but that the projects presented are for the most part merely school or studio projects by architectural students or name designers, or the results of competitions sponsored by the manufacturers of various materials; i.e., plywood, plastic, metal. As a result most of these projects, and especially those on the exterior lot, are only fanciful musings made of inhospitable materials exploring engineering concepts and without having as their base a philosophy of what constitutes a home, a human habitation: it is more nearly a show about some of the work of prominent or up and coming young architects than it is about housing.
The reference to Frank Lloyd Wright illustrates my observation. Displayed are some architectural drawings made by the Wright studio for houses made of poured concrete. There are as well drawings for the Jacobs House. But no mention is made that the Jacobs House was the prototype of the Usonia House, housing designed for working class families, of which almost two hundred were built, or of Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, which was one of Wright’s early masterpieces in molded reinforced concrete and currently being considered by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. Broad Acres, Wright’s designed community, is not mentioned nor are the houses Wright designed using cement blocks. (Nor are cement blocks mentioned.) Probably more than any other architect of the twentieth Century Wright explored the idea of prefabrication and affordable domestic architecture on the most extended scale. That his inclusion here is merely token is very obvious.
By contrast a building designed by Ray and Charles Eames using catalogue available, factory made pieces is presented as a unique exercise, although it might have been pointed out as well that the Seattle Public Library, designed by Rem Koolhaus, follows that same practice and that despite the predominance of the standardization in its parts it is the most modern of modern buildings.
The error of almost all of these structures is that they follow too closely the Corbusian dictum that a house is a factory for living, rather than the Wrightian concept that a house is a home, a place of beauty that is a refuge from the world outside. In too many of these models there is a too hardness of surface. It was delightful to see several models of buildings designed by Jean Prouvet. I saw his Tropical House fully erected at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2005. It is a very nice design, one I would think that is very well suited for a tropical climate. But I was very put off by its metal surfaces. Its hardness was too hard. I could not imagine living comfortably in that space. Nor did I sense in his other buildings that they would make good living spaces. They are attractive exteriors of modern buildings but they are empty on the inside. I sensed a lack of what Wright called organic architecture: their form did not arise from the center, from their function.
When I first saw the Tropical House, and seeing it here again, I was aware of how much nicer I thought it would be had it been made in bamboo. Bamboo is a wonderful, warm, and somehow human material and it is one of the most sustainable of building materials. It has great strength: in Colombia, many years ago, I observed that many of the high rise buildings under construction were built using a scaffolding of bamboo. There is no mention here of bamboo although there are architects whose work can be seen on You Tube who are working with it to build prefabricated housing.
This awareness brought to my mind the realization that while the Buckminster Fuller Wichita House, made of sheet metal, had been planned but never built, (although growing up near Wichita in the 1950’s I believe I remember having seen some buildings similar to that one), there is a very similar factory made product, The Air Stream Mobile Home, which has had a great popularity over the years. It even has its own fan club. I thought it odd that that or any of the other mobile homes that have been used as the building blocks of communities all over the country were omitted. Was it because they were not designed by Name Architects? (I have recently come across a word I like very, very much: Starchitect. Very apt here.)
Of the designs in this exhibition that were realized none of them appears to have been embraced by the public, none of them was as commercially successful as is the modular homes being fabricated now for exurbia. Considering these recent modular homes with their variations of stylistic references, Tudor, Georgian, Cape, it made me wonder if those in the exhibition were not successful because the designs lacked a syntax that communicated successfully with the working class house buying public. When a man decides to buy or to build himself a house, he generally considers that he is “putting a roof over his head”. Showing him a structure that lacks a visible roof is not likely to illicit his admiration. Add to that the omission of other visible syntactical clues, entryway treatments, windows, chimneys, etc. and we should be able to understand the marketing problems.
I believe Frank Lloyd Wright understood this. In his prairie houses his roofs have a low pitch, low but there is a visible roof however slight it might be. In Fallingwater there is no roof. But his client was an educated man for whom something in a different syntax might have been attempted. (In addition, the man’s son was one of Wright’s students: he could interpret the building for his father!) Knowing that Mr. Kaufman was educated and wealthy, and that the homes built more recently by other architects for other wealthy clients are in the modern sensibility, sans roof, it can be understood that there has been an evolution within the syntax of home building: a house with a roof is a working class house, a house without a roof is for the upper crust. Marketing then becomes a success or a failure because each of the buyers knows his place. (And refuses to budge from it.)
The model in this exhibition that most successfully addresses the issue of syntax is the New Orleans House. It is a literal reference to the houses already in that city. But this particular example has a whole set of other problems. I have painted many murals and I have produced decorative paint finishes on any number of walls. Almost everyone I have ever known has wanted to “decorate” his personal space. Seeing this house with its snap together jigsaw puzzle pieces, I saw surfaces with insurmountable problems for the decorative finish. In the end, despite its stylistic charm, I saw only an inhospitable engineering concept presented for public consideration.
Of the five houses on the empty lot not one of them seemed to me to have been designed as a residence. Each of them was simply a working out of engineering concepts. Not one of them had a sense of flow or of place. All of them were impersonal. In the Cellophane House I could only imagine how horrified FLW might have been once he had stepped inside it. It lacked charm and character and failed to direct the attention and movement. The only positive I found in any of these was the System3 entry, a modular unit made of wood. Stepping into that warm, embracing environment in which the material muted the exterior sound, giving it the acoustical pleasure of a concert hall, I understood that there is a syntax in building material as well, and that none of these designers had taken that into consideration.
It is always interesting how quality shows, how the superior entry will make its presence known. Of all of the beautifully made models on display here, none of them seem so human and so logical and so right as the model of a design by Paul Rudolph. I can imagine an entire exhibition being built around this work…his work in fact. I hope the time will soon be right for that to happen.
The exhibition on the sixth floor incorporated drawings, photographs, films, models, and building parts, unfortunately in a fairly standard, run of the mill multi media installation. I think uninspired sums it up. On the other hand, viewed strictly as an exhibition of beautifully made architectural models this is an excellent exhibition, if you like architectural models. I do. That the works are better as models made of wood than the stone, metal, or plastic of the finished buildings should alert some clever young architect to a valuable insight. The warm glow of the wooden model of the Safdie project built in Israel, in cement, was a breathtaking variation.
The looming presence of the grossly ugly and decrepit Lustron House at the rear of the installation should have set bells to ringing for the exhibition designers. Not even museum lighting could have salvaged this. (As far as I could tell, there was no lighting at all on this cold and corroded metal box.) Rule one: there can be too much of a bad thing.
Just inside the exhibition gallery the room was bisected by a wall of 2 by 4 studding showing us a modern construction technique. But that technique is used in stick built houses, not in prefabricated housing. In addition this was not construction grade lumber but dimensional lumber in a first grade quality material. Construction material in modern housing, from forests grown for the trade, is a scandal of inferiority. But of course such a common material would be inappropriate in the august Museum of Modern Art. Apparently on west 53rd Street, wrong is better than representational, in keeping, I suppose, with the abstract nature of so much of the artwork there.
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=5476
These were my notes:
The current commercial success of modular homes in America…factory made log home kits…post and beam timber kits…teepees…yurts…bamboo.
From the review of the exhibition in The New York Review of Books, I had understood that this was a thorough presentation of the history of prefabricated housing. After spending an hour with the material and an hour at the talk, I found that I disagreed with that appraisal. Following the talk I spent another hour in the gallery and about fifteen minutes with the five projects on the adjacent lot. My opinion remained unchanged.
Taking the nomadic culture of early human communities into consideration, modular housing is one of the oldest of human artifacts. To confine an overview of the subject to the past 180 years and focus exclusively on the West, denies the full range of that history and very likely omits some concepts and practices that might be useful to modern architects who have that area as an interest. There is also a noticeable omission in this exhibition of the state sponsored building that has been erected by the Soviet Union, China, (where vast cities have been built for enormous populations), as well as in India and Latin America. Many of those projects were erected using modular units.
Considering all of these omissions it became clear that the work presented has a reference to low or middle income housing in the industrialized west, but that the projects presented are for the most part merely school or studio projects by architectural students or name designers, or the results of competitions sponsored by the manufacturers of various materials; i.e., plywood, plastic, metal. As a result most of these projects, and especially those on the exterior lot, are only fanciful musings made of inhospitable materials exploring engineering concepts and without having as their base a philosophy of what constitutes a home, a human habitation: it is more nearly a show about some of the work of prominent or up and coming young architects than it is about housing.
The reference to Frank Lloyd Wright illustrates my observation. Displayed are some architectural drawings made by the Wright studio for houses made of poured concrete. There are as well drawings for the Jacobs House. But no mention is made that the Jacobs House was the prototype of the Usonia House, housing designed for working class families, of which almost two hundred were built, or of Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, which was one of Wright’s early masterpieces in molded reinforced concrete and currently being considered by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. Broad Acres, Wright’s designed community, is not mentioned nor are the houses Wright designed using cement blocks. (Nor are cement blocks mentioned.) Probably more than any other architect of the twentieth Century Wright explored the idea of prefabrication and affordable domestic architecture on the most extended scale. That his inclusion here is merely token is very obvious.
By contrast a building designed by Ray and Charles Eames using catalogue available, factory made pieces is presented as a unique exercise, although it might have been pointed out as well that the Seattle Public Library, designed by Rem Koolhaus, follows that same practice and that despite the predominance of the standardization in its parts it is the most modern of modern buildings.
The error of almost all of these structures is that they follow too closely the Corbusian dictum that a house is a factory for living, rather than the Wrightian concept that a house is a home, a place of beauty that is a refuge from the world outside. In too many of these models there is a too hardness of surface. It was delightful to see several models of buildings designed by Jean Prouvet. I saw his Tropical House fully erected at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2005. It is a very nice design, one I would think that is very well suited for a tropical climate. But I was very put off by its metal surfaces. Its hardness was too hard. I could not imagine living comfortably in that space. Nor did I sense in his other buildings that they would make good living spaces. They are attractive exteriors of modern buildings but they are empty on the inside. I sensed a lack of what Wright called organic architecture: their form did not arise from the center, from their function.
When I first saw the Tropical House, and seeing it here again, I was aware of how much nicer I thought it would be had it been made in bamboo. Bamboo is a wonderful, warm, and somehow human material and it is one of the most sustainable of building materials. It has great strength: in Colombia, many years ago, I observed that many of the high rise buildings under construction were built using a scaffolding of bamboo. There is no mention here of bamboo although there are architects whose work can be seen on You Tube who are working with it to build prefabricated housing.
This awareness brought to my mind the realization that while the Buckminster Fuller Wichita House, made of sheet metal, had been planned but never built, (although growing up near Wichita in the 1950’s I believe I remember having seen some buildings similar to that one), there is a very similar factory made product, The Air Stream Mobile Home, which has had a great popularity over the years. It even has its own fan club. I thought it odd that that or any of the other mobile homes that have been used as the building blocks of communities all over the country were omitted. Was it because they were not designed by Name Architects? (I have recently come across a word I like very, very much: Starchitect. Very apt here.)
Of the designs in this exhibition that were realized none of them appears to have been embraced by the public, none of them was as commercially successful as is the modular homes being fabricated now for exurbia. Considering these recent modular homes with their variations of stylistic references, Tudor, Georgian, Cape, it made me wonder if those in the exhibition were not successful because the designs lacked a syntax that communicated successfully with the working class house buying public. When a man decides to buy or to build himself a house, he generally considers that he is “putting a roof over his head”. Showing him a structure that lacks a visible roof is not likely to illicit his admiration. Add to that the omission of other visible syntactical clues, entryway treatments, windows, chimneys, etc. and we should be able to understand the marketing problems.
I believe Frank Lloyd Wright understood this. In his prairie houses his roofs have a low pitch, low but there is a visible roof however slight it might be. In Fallingwater there is no roof. But his client was an educated man for whom something in a different syntax might have been attempted. (In addition, the man’s son was one of Wright’s students: he could interpret the building for his father!) Knowing that Mr. Kaufman was educated and wealthy, and that the homes built more recently by other architects for other wealthy clients are in the modern sensibility, sans roof, it can be understood that there has been an evolution within the syntax of home building: a house with a roof is a working class house, a house without a roof is for the upper crust. Marketing then becomes a success or a failure because each of the buyers knows his place. (And refuses to budge from it.)
The model in this exhibition that most successfully addresses the issue of syntax is the New Orleans House. It is a literal reference to the houses already in that city. But this particular example has a whole set of other problems. I have painted many murals and I have produced decorative paint finishes on any number of walls. Almost everyone I have ever known has wanted to “decorate” his personal space. Seeing this house with its snap together jigsaw puzzle pieces, I saw surfaces with insurmountable problems for the decorative finish. In the end, despite its stylistic charm, I saw only an inhospitable engineering concept presented for public consideration.
Of the five houses on the empty lot not one of them seemed to me to have been designed as a residence. Each of them was simply a working out of engineering concepts. Not one of them had a sense of flow or of place. All of them were impersonal. In the Cellophane House I could only imagine how horrified FLW might have been once he had stepped inside it. It lacked charm and character and failed to direct the attention and movement. The only positive I found in any of these was the System3 entry, a modular unit made of wood. Stepping into that warm, embracing environment in which the material muted the exterior sound, giving it the acoustical pleasure of a concert hall, I understood that there is a syntax in building material as well, and that none of these designers had taken that into consideration.
It is always interesting how quality shows, how the superior entry will make its presence known. Of all of the beautifully made models on display here, none of them seem so human and so logical and so right as the model of a design by Paul Rudolph. I can imagine an entire exhibition being built around this work…his work in fact. I hope the time will soon be right for that to happen.
The exhibition on the sixth floor incorporated drawings, photographs, films, models, and building parts, unfortunately in a fairly standard, run of the mill multi media installation. I think uninspired sums it up. On the other hand, viewed strictly as an exhibition of beautifully made architectural models this is an excellent exhibition, if you like architectural models. I do. That the works are better as models made of wood than the stone, metal, or plastic of the finished buildings should alert some clever young architect to a valuable insight. The warm glow of the wooden model of the Safdie project built in Israel, in cement, was a breathtaking variation.
The looming presence of the grossly ugly and decrepit Lustron House at the rear of the installation should have set bells to ringing for the exhibition designers. Not even museum lighting could have salvaged this. (As far as I could tell, there was no lighting at all on this cold and corroded metal box.) Rule one: there can be too much of a bad thing.
Just inside the exhibition gallery the room was bisected by a wall of 2 by 4 studding showing us a modern construction technique. But that technique is used in stick built houses, not in prefabricated housing. In addition this was not construction grade lumber but dimensional lumber in a first grade quality material. Construction material in modern housing, from forests grown for the trade, is a scandal of inferiority. But of course such a common material would be inappropriate in the august Museum of Modern Art. Apparently on west 53rd Street, wrong is better than representational, in keeping, I suppose, with the abstract nature of so much of the artwork there.
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.php?id=5476
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