Not Quite Everything

(Nancy Hellebrand’s EVERYBODYBEAUTIFUL is currently showing at the Print Center through July 20, 2024.)

Body-shaming, ageism and youth-centric advertising may pervade the zeitgeist, but Nancy Hellebrand rejects these biases in her work on view at the Print Center. 

Her nuanced, warm-toned photogravures on paper and plaster are delicate and, frankly, precious in contrast to the stark realism she presents of sagging breasts, stretch marks and (mostly) flabby or obese flesh. All of her subjects here are women.  The pictures are sensitive and not the least exploitative.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is they aren’t affecting either.  It isn’t a question of trying to shed our prejudices, especially among those of us who are her subjects’ contemporaries; after all, we, too, have looked in the mirror more than a few times!!  The let down is that we have seen images like these before, by photographers and painters, and Hillebrand doesn’t show us anything new.

I find myself wanting to admire these images because they are well done, but they simply lack the angst and passion of, say, Lucien Freud, whose monumental nudes seem to literally burst out of the canvas and crowd the viewer’s space, or the torment of a Francesca Woodman, or the frank eroticism of Mapplethorpe.  I found myself thinking of Rembrandt’s late self-portraits, unflinching, unflattering, honest,  and filled with a kind of sadness that aging can bring on.  Hellebrand’s sedate images, enhanced by their tonality and treatment, end up distancing the viewer, especially since the images are quite small, even though many of them are printed on large sheets.  (The ones printed on plaster appear to be more or less the same dimensions as the prints but without the surrounding empty space.)  The result is to literally diminish the stark, unflinching realism that Hellebrand wants to show us and render these images more like collectibles, beautifully printed, unprovocative and treasurable.

Hellebrand stops at showing any faces, a decision that no doubt took into account the subjects’ desire for anonymity. I can easily imagine someone who is willing to bare almost all on the walls of a public gallery but does not want to be identified.  One can only assume this deliberate anonymity trumpets the body positivity Hellebrand embraces, that all bodies possess beauty.  According to the small catalog that accompanies the exhibition, the lack of faces did indeed serve the photographer’s purpose:   “By photographing the women from the neck down, Hellebrand focuses the viewer’s attention solely on the landscape of the body.”  Fair enough…as far as it goes.

Age may confer a lot of things, but not necessarily beauty. If beauty is to be found in aging, it is almost always in the face.  

Notes on the Jasper Johns Retrospective

What follows is not a "review" of the massive Jasper Johns retrospective divided between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum, nor is it an essay or formal critical evaluation.  While walking through the Philadelphia portion of the retrospective, I made notes on my cellphone with an eye toward later writing something formal.

I never wrote the formal piece. Instead, months passed as I let the experience percolate.  I had gone to the exhibition a doubter, suspect of Johns' reputation and largely unmoved by the random works I'd seen over the years.  I left the show a believer.  The exhibition accomplished what I always hoped would happen when going to a retrospective, an opportunity to deepen my understanding, confirm my preconceptions or, as was the case in this instance, to completely alter my perceptions.

Here are some of those notes:

The sheer size of the exhibition overwhelmed me at first.  Could there really be a companion show of entirely different works running concurrently in New York?  Such prodigious output.  Did he ever sleep?

The encaustics are so juicy and luscious.  You can lose yourself in their surfaces.  The oil paintings push back rather than draw me in like the encaustics.

Up front, let me get out of the way what many would consider utter exaggeration and hyperbole:  Jasper Johns is the most important artist since Picasso and as equally protean as the great figure.  If Johns can be considered at all flashy, it is essentially in the sense of wearing his existential angst on his sleeve like the Abstract Expressionists.  He is generally regarded as the transitional figure from AE to Pop to Minimalism but the work resists such pat categorizations.  For instance, even though the flags are loaded icons, he isn't cynical or mordant like so much Pop.  As for Minimalism, no matter how reductive some of Johns' work may appear at first glance, many of the painted surfaces are far too worked and reworked to fit that niche. 

The Ballentine cans, as famous as the target and flag paintings, are one of Johns' momentary and fleeting lapses or nods to Pop Art, but as with his two dimensional work, these make no pretense toward direct displacement; they, too, are reworked rather than simply appropriated.  Unlike Picasso, Johns only dabbled in sculpture though his combines were clearly three dimensional.  Still, they said more about painting and the surface of two dimensional works and Johns preoccupation with exploring both the process and meaning of what constituted a painting.  Working closely with his lover Robert Rauschenberg, Johns pushed out from the surface not into it, an unmistakable legacy of Picasso and Cubism.  Johns would later move on intellectually and aesthetically, while Rauschenberg didn't, as he explored every 2D medium he could get his hands on.

He is always questioning what is art or at least how it comes to be (the form) and since he is forever doubting the answer sufficiently, he must keep asking. The section entitled "Trials and Proofs" underscores this interest in the how and process and question of what is art.

He is forever breaking up the surface of the paintings while dazzling the eye.  He can be playful and somber, especially in the Japanese themed images.  The late work, as one might expect, meditates on mortality.

By the '80's there are many references to friends, the self, objects collected.  He is profoundly self-referential, not in the narcissistic way of Picasso but as an artist who is compelled to learn from himself as he goes along building and incorporating what he has just done.  Not since Monet with his haystacks, cathedral facades, etc. has an artist looked at the same thing or object over and over, endlessly seeing it anew and fresh.

Another way Picasso comes to mind is this: walking through the huge Picasso exhibition at MOMA many years ago I had the feeling as the exhibition unfolded chronologically that Picasso would look at, say, Manet,  and when doing so he would fully grasped his importance and incorporate his lessons into his own art.  Then, the next year, he would move on to Cezanne and do the same thing and then on to the next touchstone until he became the touchstone.  He was that facile and inventive.  And he refused to be seen strictly as a painter, or a sculptor or even a ceramicist.  Johns seems to have done the same thing, less flamboyantly, less facilely, but in his way just as convincingly.

Johns does not see targets, flags, numbers or letters as popular icons.  He sees them as signs so ubiquitous they almost disappear in their quotidian ever-presence until he calls our attention to them.  And as such, he can explore their appearance not for meaning but for appearance sake, and this is what really matters to him, for the ways they can become art objects.  The greatness of Johns is that he takes common, ordinary, familiar symbols and signs and plumbs their visual possibilities in ways we've never experienced them before.  He investigates them endlessly, ad nauseam even, always discovering something about them, something that is so unfamiliar about the familiar. And isn't that one of the things we most admire about artists?!

Unexpected Beauty

The Philadelphia Museum of Art recently debuted portions of the $233 million renovations designed by Frank Gehry, and, no, they do not feature flamboyant waves of glistening titanium or swirling gestures of wood.  Indeed, many people who expected such histrionics from the famous architect of the Guggenheim Bilbao were disappointed by the understatements that greeted them.

I wasn't.

What Gehry has achieved is a soothing, fluid integration of the new and practical with the old and classical.  The only nod towards flamboyance, the staircase in the new Williams Forum, is something of a disappointment.  Featured in every article and press release about the new spaces, it appears to be a tacked on afterthought leading to or from what is ultimately intended as performance space.  While it awaits performers, however, the forum's daily function is nothing short of an extravagant waste of space.  Eschewing supports beneath it, the staircase bobs and weaves as it descends.  Close inspection beneath it reveals treads made of the same Kasota limestone that graces the original building with hollow back panels made of some composite to which the same "surface" is applied.  This clever solution lightens the load so that supports can be eliminated but does not, alas, give the stairway much grace.  Visitors could be seen ascending and descending the staircase while photographing it from every conceivable angle.

This "disappointment" is minor, however.  (It should be noted that more than a few members of the public did wonder aloud was "this all we got" for $233 million.)

The project is not finished, however; more exhibit space renovations are planned and underway. 

Frankly, while the completed renovations already improve some of the exhibit space, the real star of the "new" museum is in fact an old feature long since abandoned but newly resurrected.  The long barrel-vaulted passageway that serves as the newly re-opened north entrance to the museum is magnificent in its simple, elegant beauty.  New soft, discreet lighting has been added to smoothly, gracefully move visitors along its considerable length, and the glossy brick ceiling gently reflects light.  New floors were laid, of the same Kasota limestone (and reportedly from the same quarry as the original materials), and the entire blending of subtle beiges is soothing and in its dramatic length awe-inspiring.  Many visitors were unaware that Gehry and his team were responsible for these changes.

This entrance had been closed for years and most if not all museum goers (including this one) were completely unaware of its existence.  The museum was compelled to reopen it since the west entrance, the means by which most visitors had been entering the museum for decades, has been closed as further renovations get underway.  When Gehry was charged with renovating and restoring this corridor, he reportedly said "We just had to not screw it up!"  He didn't!  It is the greatest triumph thus far of his ongoing renovations and the pleasures of this corridor provide unexpected beauty.

Fanfare For The Common Denominator

If the Philadelphia Museum of Art wishes to lower its standards to appeal to broader audiences, Philadelphia Assembled (currently running at the Perelman Building through December 17, 2017) is literally the ticket.

In our politicized age museum administrators and donors feel enormous pressure to reach out to their surrounding communities, embrace and underwrite art and artists they have traditionally shunned and engage previously disenfranchised audiences in terms to which they can relate.

Locally, the headlong rush into community outreach began in earnest with the Zoe Strauss retrospective of a few years ago, continued more recently with the “Wild” exhibition that just completed its run and currently reaches its apogee in “Philadelphia Assembled”, an exuberant, muddled assemblage of folk art, fine art, indigenous commerce, ethnic memory, community activism and polemic.

One cannot help suspect these efforts may boost the Museum’s attendance bottom line in the short term but not engage the new audiences when more traditional exhibitions are mounted.  (“Old Masters Now,” a celebration of the museum’s justly famous Johnson collection, will be an immediate test.) One thing is certain:  the pay-as-you-wish policy in effect for this exhibition won’t help the museum’s financial bottom line.

Cultural institutions must evolve to survive.  Whether or not they need to turn their backs on their traditional roles is another matter.  The staff, donors and organizers would have us believe the doors to the Museum no longer secure a forbidding fortress set upon the hill but rather are permanently thrown open, becoming a supersized community center albeit one that predominantly houses priceless objects we still dare not touch!

Philadelphia Assembled, organized by the Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswjick, gives voice to the dispossessed and oppressed populations of Philadelphia, principally but not exclusively peoples of color.  (I have no problem with outsiders coming to town, staying for a while to take its pulse and then mastermind an exhibition.  However, it is presumptuous in the extreme to believe a year or even two in residence is adequate to claim any meaningful understanding of such a large, diverse urban population.).

If nothing else, the exhibition confronts the viewer with imagery that is unfamiliar in museums and with voices unheard except in the streets.  This is the real thrust of Philadelphia Assembled, displacing alternative visions from their originating communities into a setting where one expects to see art.  It’s a form of illusion and if we grasp the idea, the objects become mere souvenirs of the occasion.  One might test this theory by trying to recall in detail most of the imagery from the exhibition.

Anyone who drives through parts of this city other than its glitzy center cannot have avoided seeing the neighborhoods “re-assembled” in the museum.   Philadelphia has huge expanses of these depressed neighborhoods whose populations have been marginalized and rendered mostly invisible to outsiders.  Museum Director Timothy Rub envisioned an experience “… when our galleries are appropriated to become a stage for the city itself.”  A “period room” reconstruction from a Kensington home that houses the Alumni Ex-Offenders offices is a prime example of Rub’s vision.  So, too, is a wall of street signs proclaiming “We Buy Houses”, all of which display the identical phone number that connects to a voice mailbox where visitors can record messages about personal stories of gentrification and displacement.  In fact, the entire undertaking is a two-way street since Philadelphia Assembled began with a series of community events and participation outside the museum’s walls such as the lighting of an underpass in Nicetown last spring meant to draw attention to mass incarceration.  The second phase is comprised of these installations at the Perelman.

The most striking example of the stark contrast between low and high art is the wall of polaroid photos of Philadelphia prisoners serving life sentences in Pennsylvania and Jeffrey Stockbridge’s photographs of drug addicts and prostitutes in the Kensington neighborhood.  The polaroids, with their frontal flash lighting, centered compositions and inherent small format, are of record-making at its most simple and direct.  Their sheer numbers overwhelm any individuality they might achieve despite being accompanied by statements and names.  

Stockbridge’s photographs, on the other hand, are carefully composed and lighted and in a few instances printed very large.  They are very individual.  Their polish seems strangely out of place here and indeed the images were not made with Philadelphia Assembled in mind.  This last point also dramatically underscores the clear racial distinction between Stockbridge’s nearly all white subjects and the peoples of color that predominate the rest of the exhibition.  His are the very few images that expand the notion of Philadelphia in its greater diversity assembled. (Stockbridge’s photographs also belong to that huge category of images of long-standing presence in museums and galleries that allow viewers who would normally cross the street rather than confront these subjects to feel safe if not compassionate about facing them in a setting of art.)

The museum’s website states the exhibition is organized around five principles: 

Reconstructions: How do we rewrite our histories?

Sovereignty: How do we define self-determination & unit? Sanctuary: How do we create safe spaces?Futures: How do we reimagine our tomorrow? Movement: How do we share knowledge?

All of these beg the larger question of how we begin to arrive at answers, however tentative, in the context of art and the museum.  After all, the Museum is the nexus of assembly.  According to the museum’s website, the “Sovereignty” working group “is exploring the concepts of the marketplace and cultural exchange as they relate to histories of self-determination and the preservation of community wisdom. PHLA will partner with various businesses along the 52nd Street corridor in West Philadelphia to offer spaces for creating unity and cultivating economic sovereignty.”

To that end, events were organized in West Philadelphia such as “Jewelry Making with Esau” , “Knitting for Unity and PaPosse Crafts”, and Essential Oils and Incense Production.”  In the end, however, displacing artifacts, symbols and signs into a museum does not address the fundamental question of what are our expectations of the institution.  And if the ultimate goal is the complete dissolution of boundaries, why move into the museum in the first place?  Why not simply declare Philadelphia an open museum city?

Denise Valentine, a Philadelphia storyteller collaborating in the exhibition, had this to say in Hyperallergic, a “forum for serious, playful, and radical thinking about art in the world today, headquartered in Brooklyn, New York”: “We intend to re-imagine the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a place to unearth stories hidden deep in the soil of Philadelphia. We envision a place where narratives of the enslaved, the incarcerated, the displaced, and the disenfranchised are held in as high esteem as Eurocentric ideas about art, history, and culture.”

The Philadelphia Museum of Art cannot be all things to all people unless, of course, it seeks to preserve and present the lowest common denominator.  Even then, however, if everything is art, nothing is art.

Mild

Wild: Michael Nichols (at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through September 17, 2017) is an exemplary show for a major art museum in the 21st Century;  “exemplary” but not very satisfying.

Nichols, a renowned photographer of wildlife as well as a zealous advocate of habitat and species preservation, is also one brave dude.  He ventures into the most remote, forbidding and dangerous environments throughout the world.  He is also an admired technical innovator whose experiments and inventions have made possible images previously impossible to realize.

What he is not is an important artist.  But that isn’t the point the Philadelphia Museum of Art really wants to make though it tries to have it both ways.

Mounting a huge exhibition of oversized prints of wildlife and habitats seeks to draw a broader audience than do the usual sanctified works of, say, Impressionism or 17th Century Holland.  Think of this exhibition as part of the PMA’s new outreach program intended to encourage people not normally disposed to visit traditional museums of art to visit and find works that are immediately accessible and pleasing. Nichols’ work is certainly that, but

it is not particularly challenging intellectually or rewarding aesthetically.

Documentary or advocacy photography has had a long, sometimes tenuous relationship to the traditional art world of painting and sculpture.  Today, however, Walker Evans, Eugene Atget, or Sebastiao Salgado among many are revered, exhibited and collected by both worlds.  All of them made photographs on assignment or for commercial purposes that were later divorced from their original contexts and displaced into the museum or gallery.   Their entry into the pantheon of artists is secure yet few viewers regard their work in its original terms, documenting the Farm Security Administration (Evans), making documents to sell to artists (Atget), or documenting the gold mining industry (Salgado).

As if to lend further credence to the notion that Nichols’ work fits into that broader tradition, the PMA shows a number of paintings and sculptures from its own collection alongside the photographs.  Among these are Edward Hicks The Peaceable Kingdom, Henri Rousseau’s The Merry Jesters or Tommy Dale Palmore’s Reclining Nude.  Yet each of these works is not rooted in advocacy, cataloguing or the making of documents.  (Interestingly, one need only walk down the hall from the Nichols’ exhibition to the concurrent, magnificent show of Goya prints to recognize where documenting ends and art begins.)

Nichols’ work is flat aesthetically.  Big cats leaping towards the lens are dramatic while images of orphan elephants covered by handlers in protective clothing do evoke sympathy, but they do not excite the imagination the way Rousseau’s dreamy invented landscapes inhabited by oddly acting creatures do.  Nor do his photographs exhibit the spiritual origins of Hicks’ biblically inspired painting in which the leopard, kid and children “lie down” together in harmony.  Instead, Nichols gives us a pride of lions devouring its prey as a matter-of-fact statement about survival. And compared to the high irony of Palmore’s Reclining Nude, a huge ape assuming the pose of a classical nude, Nichols’ unambiguous photographs of apes are prosaic.

Photographs of Jane Goodall, monkeys and apes seek to educate and inform.  The series on elephants revolves around the dire conditions created by poachers, who have imperiled the population of wild elephants despite efforts to stop this illegal practice.  Nichols does reach the viewer emotionally, challenging our complacency about disappearance of habitat and the animals living within, but on a level we associate more with appeals from the World Wildlife Federation or the huge number of nature shows on television rather than the ways in which we respond to, say, Durer’s enigmatic and fantastic Rhinoceros.  This is not a bad thing. Indeed, judging from the good attendance I saw on an early, hot Saturday morning in mid-July, I would say the show is a success.  It just isn’t especially memorable.

A version of this article first appeared in the Broad Street Review

New Mormon Temple Pitched

“Tours” of the new Mormon Temple in Philadelphia are now being offered to the public free of charge until the official dedication in September.  Lasting about an hour, they are preceded by a 10 minute inspirational film that sets the mood for presentations to follow.

“Tour” isn’t exactly the proper term here.  Yes, we were guided through the new space while our hosts, different ones in each room, and others stationed in every stairwell and corridor, briefly explained what each part was used for.  The main thrust of their talk, however, was concerned with devotion, baptism, the afterlife, the joys of belonging to the Temple and personal anecdotes about their faith.  I’ll limit myself here to the building itself.

The overall impression is of an immaculate, pristine space in which nary a paint roller brush stroke, crooked line or imperfect miter appears,  All surfaces, be they granite or drywall, are perfect. Not a single seam wavers.  Switch plate covers are perfectly aligned. Banisters and railings are all perfectly joined and silken to the touch.  Everything sparkles from the enormous chandeliers to stained-glass windows.  Visitors are required to wear booties to preserve the mostly lily-white carpeting, marble and hardwood flooring.  While understandable given the large crowds passing through in devotion or curiosity, one has the feeling the perfection will endure long after the "tours" end and the real business begins.  There is no room here for imperfections.

That said, the structure has as much character as a convention hotel or mortuary.

Worst are the god awful paintings adorning nearly every wall and corridor.  Many look as if they’ve been acquired from the firms that supply motel chains.  Badly painted and generic, they seem to be after thoughts intended to break up the monotony of the endless perfection.  Reproduction furniture abounds.  The overall impression is of Neo-Bland, antiseptic and unexceptional.

The colors of the walls are almost all a variation on white or beige, soothing to the point of boredom. There are no grand halls though a few larger spaces have soaring ceilings.  There are, however, dozens of small rooms, like breakout conference rooms in any of a thousand corporate centers and hotels.  These, our guides tell us, are where most of the real work is done, behind closed doors.  There is no main sanctuary with its row after row of pews, altar or bema.

The exterior of the building makes no pretense of being modern.  Indeed, it is unabashedly retrograde without ever defining any particular style.  There are plenty of classical elements to go around, all the more to establish pedigree and tradition.  There are occasional elements suggesting the Baroque and some that even attempt to evoke the 18th Century colonial traditions of Philadelphia.  In other words, it is a pastiche pure and simple.  Having seen Mormon temples in several other cities throughout the United States I can say they vary more than your average McDonald's but all clearly adhere to a style book.

A baptismal font set on 12 bronzed oxen representing the twelve tribes of Israel is perhaps the most soothing room of all because unlike nearly every other space in the temple, one looks down, not up or across, into the cool, inviting water, which swirls softly in contrast to the stasis everywhere else.  This view is small consolation for an otherwise forgettable experience.

A Triumph of Didacticism & Delectation

My first reaction to the news last year the Philadelphia Museum of Art would be mounting a major exhibition of the Impressionists this spring was that the last thing we need is another damn Impressionist show.

I was wrong, terribly wrong.

Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting, revolves around Durand-Ruel, the prescient and shrewd Parisian dealer who championed, promoted, bought and sold thousands of works by the Impressionists.  His acuity and vision are attested to by the wondrous collection of paintings seen here, many for the first time in the United States and some for the first time together in more than a century.

The wall labels require as much scrutiny as the art itself.  On each we learn not only the year in which the painting was excecuted, but also the year it was first acquired by Durand-Ruel, to whom it was subsequently sold or auctioned, and, sometimes, the  year it was reacquired and resold--often by Durand-Ruel.  The last entry on each label names the current institution or individual who owns the work and from whom it was acquired.

Also included among the artifacts of the exhibition is Durand-Ruel's ledger, which lists, among its many columns, the asking and selling prices for each work he handled.  This was a dealer who was clearly willing to gamble but also one who maintained meticulous records of each transaction.

Audiences today are generally well aware of the role that major galleries and private dealers play, not just in the success of individual artists but in the prices realized for their work.  Indeed, beginning in the mid-19th century, dealers became celebrities themselves: in some cases, they became the subject of works.  This exhibition successfully limns not only the triumphs of the relationship between a dealer and his stable, but also its pitfalls and failures.

Durand-Ruel took risks in championing artists who were unknown or unpopular at the time.  He never doubted the revolutionary qualities of their work, but he was faced with hostile or indifferent critics and audiences and skeptical collectors.  He employed -- often for the first time -- all the strategies with which we are now familiar: bidding on his own artists’ works at auction to prop up the prices; purchasing paintings in bulk from the artists, sometimes before all in a series were even executed; and prodding his artists on aesthetic grounds.

Durand-Ruel would often visit an artist’s studio and buy 25 to 30 paintings or more on the spot. Needless to say, these purchases (or advances he would make for future works) were entirely speculative. Monet’s 1883 exhibition of roughly 60 paintings was a complete failure — nothing sold. A decade later Durand-Ruel exhibited Monet’s Poplars and all of them sold.

Durand-Ruel flirted with or went through a few bankruptcies. He purchased works in collaboration with other dealers. He borrowed heavily. He opened galleries in other European capitals and in New York. He traveled ceaselessly in support of his artists. Indeed, he first met Monet and Pissarro in London, where they and others had fled to escape the Franco-Prussian War.

The Impressionists’ first major exhibition as a group was in 1874. Two years later, they mounted their second important group show at Durand-Ruel’s gallery in Paris. It was not a commercial success. The first major commercial success from a show came in New York, not Paris — an 1886 exhibition at the American Art Galleries in New York was well received. A second exhibition followed immediately at the National Academy of Design in New York. Buoyed by the positive experiences in New York, including sales to a number of important American collectors (many of whom are represented on the wall labels of this exhibition), Durand-Ruel returned to Paris, where future exhibitions, including the Monet show of Poplars, were both critical and financial successes.

This exhibit is not simply about the making of reputations and the business of art. Durand-Ruel can be said to have discovered, as well as promoted, these artists, but had he not, someone else would have come along — the art is wonderful. Many of the paintings that fill the exhibit’s walls were unknown to me, even in reproduction; others I was seeing in person for the first time. All of them confirmed their original champion's intuition. 

(This article first appeared in the Broad Street Review)

Finishing First & Last

If nice guys finish last, the biggest SOBs must finish first, right?

Well, if your name is Robert Frank, the answer appears to be a resounding “yes.”

The cover story in the July 2 New York Times Magazine names Frank “the most influential photographer alive.” In the process of making that case, author Nicholas Dawidoff also paints a portrait of a misanthrope of epic proportions.

Both assessments have much merit.

Frank’s great achievement was the publication of The Americans, 83 photographs culled from the tens of thousands he shot as he crisscrossed the country on a Guggenheim fellowship in the mid-1950s.

Initially, the book was hardly a success. Indeed, Frank could not find an American press willing to publish it. Les Américains was first published in 1958 in Paris, where it found a sympathetic audience among left-wing intellectuals hostile to post-war American hegemony.

The first edition did not even carry a photograph by Frank on the cover; instead, a Saul Steinberg drawing graced it. The French edition also contained numerous writings by well-known authors, including Simone de Beauvoir and William Faulkner, and some critics felt these overshadowed the pictures. It wasn’t until 1959 that a U.S. edition was printed by Grove Press. In that case, the French edition’s texts were removed entirely, a forward was written by Jack Kerouac, and a photograph by Frank appeared on the cover.

That first American edition enjoyed limited success, but Kerouac’s introduction was instrumental in introducing Frank’s work to a small but sympathetic audience here. The second edition, printed in 1969, achieved tremendous success and established Frank’s place among the most influential photographers of his time.

The work was revolutionary, but its timing was also critical.

Unlike earlier “street photographers” like Cartier-Bresson or “documentarians” like Walker Evans, Frank was not interested in order, structure, decisiveness, or public policy. (Actually, Evans wasn’t interested in the latter either, but he produced some of his most important work under the aegis of the Farm Security Administration.)

Rather, Frank’s was a gruff, sharp-eyed and -tongued look at the underbelly of American society. He eschewed beautiful prints or, at times, even focus and perspective correction, to stare unflinchingly at the otherness of America, that is, the America that ended up on the metaphorical cutting room floor of the exhibition The Family of Man, which opened the same year Frank began his American sojourn.

Frank, a curmudgeon from an early age, openly disdained the sort of thinking that saw humankind as one big, happy family. He held institutions in general in contempt and professed disdain for the trappings of success even while he benefited financially from the acclaim he received and the support they provided.

The Times Magazine piece also makes it clear he was a lousy husband and even lousier father, as well as an unpredictable friend as likely to turn on you as not — neither of which, of course, precludes greatness in art.

Whether or not Frank consciously perceived the sea change about to get underway in America (and the argument can be made that as a foreigner he was in a unique position to do so), he did exploit two converging movements in the late 1960s in America. As the hippie movement expanded, American youth hit the road in record numbers not seen since the migrations of the Great Depression — the difference being that in the later period road trips were more often than not elective. Kerouac’s On the Road had been published a decade earlier, but by the time of the second printing of The Americans, it seemed as though everyone was headed for Haight-Ashbury or a commune in New Mexico or some music festival on some farm in upstate New York.

The other element of the zeitgeist coinciding with the second printing of The Americans was the antiwar, antiestablishment mood. The American dream had soured badly, and youth openly rebelled at racial and economic inequalities and the imperial arrogance of the best and the brightest. The Americans became a kind of visual anthem for a rebellious generation newly attuned to the outliers in its midst.

Meanwhile, Frank abandoned photography, and eventually New York, for film and rural life in Nova Scotia. He also divorced his first wife and more or less abandoned his children. Now celebrated in both the art and photography worlds (they were still seen as largely separate in those days), Frank nevertheless disdained elitism and high culture. “Once respectability and success become a part of it, then it was time to look for a new mistress,” he wrote in 1969. Occasionally he would appear in issues of Creative Camera — a short-lived photography magazine — writing his "Letter from New York", a missive so vitriolic and bitter regarding the art scene, the editors dropped it.

Frank no longer made photographs. He was spent, having said all he had to say in that medium. Dawidoff quotes more than a few indie filmmakers who insist that even had Frank not established himself as one of the gods of photography, his influence and reputation in film would suffice to secure his reputation. His films never achieved a significant audience. Pull My Daisy, his first film, enjoyed the most “success,” but not for its disjointed, rough, unorthodox appearance and “celebrity” cast of beat personalities. Rather, it was seen as a cultural document of irreverent hijinx.

Today, 90 years old and, as documented in Katy Grannan’s marvelous photographs, which accompany the article, disheveled in the extreme, Frank lives in New York part of the year. He still likes to hurl barbs at the self-important and entitled, but he knows the value of his name and his work as a photographer and isn’t above capitalizing on these when it suits him.

(This article first appeared in the Broad Street Review)

Second Acts

One seldom realizes historic moments have occurred until well after the fact.  Fortunately, there are occasional second acts in life.  The Met's show of the Leonard Lauder Cubist Collection is just such an occasion. One hundred years after Cubism's revolution, visitors to this exhibition can witness history unfolding again in all its radical, inventive glory.

Cubism emerged over a decade, primarily in two studios, and in two stages.  The Lauder collection includes four artists, Braque, Picasso, Gris and Leger, but only the first two were making history.  The other two, along with peripheral figures, were drafting in their wake.

Of course Cubism did not emerge in a vacuum, and Braque and Picasso acknowledged as much with their numerous tributes to Cezanne.  But Cubism's grand gesture, drawing the blinds on the window of Renaissance tradition and convention, was a discreet moment in painting's history and everyone, especially its two heroes, knew it was happening and consciously took credit for it.

Try as we might, the objects and figures referenced in the matter-of-fact titles bestowed on their canvases by Braque and Picasso led the viewer into dead ends.  One could not penetrate the canvas, that is, look through the window.  Even their reductive monochromatic palettes thwarted the expectations built up over four hundred years of painting.  The framed canvas was no window on the world. Modernism's water had broken.

A few years later the second stage emerged as Braque and Picasso began incorporating newspaper clippings or chair caning among other objects in their canvases.  Thus, these masters of representation willingly stepped aside and allowed things to represent themselves.  Modernism was born.  Paintings were indeed flat panels on wood, canvas or other material with paint and things on them.  Pure abstraction was unleashed and Modernism surged ahead.

The Lauder collection is extraordinarily rich in surveying these dramatic moments as they burst onto the scene.  As a bonus since all 81 works in the collection now permanently reside at the Met, the gift not only makes that museum a prime destination for anyone wishing to understand Cubism, but a mere 30 blocks south sits MOMA, which owns the greatest, large-scale triumph of Cubism, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.  Thus, the visitor to New York can see the birth of modernism in a single afternoon.

Ray Metzker

Innovator.  Formalist.  Intellectual searcher.  Legatee of the American Bauhaus.

Ray Metzker, who passed away in early October at the age of 83, has been called all of the above.  He has also been called one of the most important photographers of the second half of the 20th Century.

These labels are accurate albeit incomplete.

Ray, who was my mentor in graduate school and my friend and colleague after that, was one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th Century and first decade of this one.  Despite the often brooding, mysterious, intense and foreboding nature of much of his work, he had a whimsical, playful side to him as well.  Light dances.  Lines pulsate.  Titles such as "Flutterbye" and "Hot Diggedy" are hardly expressions of existential angst.

The last important body of work he completed, images of reflections in car windshields and bodies, was executed as late as 2009. These capped a career of relentless discoveries and summarized the qualities that set Metzker apart and defined his legacy:  curiosity, an eye for the ordinary and a resultant extraordinary vision in bold black and white.  He could see in layers, combinations, simultaneity.  Like the late modernist he was, he learned the lessons not only of photography but of art in general, distilled them and synthesized his own take.  He understood photographs were objects themselves and went about rethinking how they could be realized, how they could appear.

Metzker was never a big star, nor did he seek celebrity.  He wasn't even particularly famous most of his career, recognition coming relatively early and then quiet and subdued for many years.  He spoke of receiving little recognition from colleagues where he taught, but, then, he was too jealous of his time to work to let them intrude socially. He did, however, receive important recognition from the Guggenheim Foundation (twice), the National Endowment for the Arts, and other sources.

When I would tell people I had studied with him they invariably would say, “Oh, yes, the photographer who did the composites.”  These were clearly his breakthrough pieces, the ones that established him as a formidable figure.  Not satisfied with the single image, Metzker explored multiple images, assembled or printed as uncut rolls of film, rhythmic and pulsating and dazzling.  They were also quite large in many cases, well before the current era of huge prints, many of which are large simply because it is possible, not because the vision demanded it as was the case with Metzker.  The multiples were, ironically, predominantly one of a kinds, another challenge to the notion that the photograph was endlessly reproducible.

But the reception of the multiples (or composites as some labeled them) were hardly laurels upon which he rested. Double-frame images, single images, landscapes, non-representational photograms, figures lying on the beach preceded and followed them and ultimately constituted a prodigious output in both numbers and quality.

Ray's studio walls were covered with found objects, many of which did not make it into his work but clearly influenced it.  He was a flaneur, roaming with and without his camera.  To walk the streets of Philadelphia with Ray was to see them anew if not for the first time! He'd noticed a new business or renovation underway and recalled what was there previously.  He would marvel at some architectural detail and, suddenly, stare at a shaft of light fallng across a façade.

After graduate school and a stint in the military, Ray traveled in Europe for more than a year, taking walks and pictures, developing his film in makeshift “darkrooms” in hotels and pensions.  When I asked him how he would work during that sojourn he said simply, “One day I would walk out the door and turn to the left; the next day I would turn to the right.”

As arbitrary as that sounded to me then, I realized later he always carried what he called “terms” with him.  Some thing or quality of light or forms had caught his attention on one of his walks and he went out the next day with them in mind.  He didn't have a specific picture planned, just these qualities that made pictures worth taking...and looking at.  This approach was the key to what made Metzker an artist of importance and what made his work challenging.  He understood that the artist begins his exploration by admitting what he doesn't know.  Then he sets out to try and discover meanings.

(Versions of this piece first appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer's Op-Ed page and The Broad Street Review)

Oddities R Us

David Graham has made a career of searching for and finding cultural oddities and modest  -- very modest -- visual ironies.  A survey of them is on view at Gallery 339 in his show "David Graham: Thirty-five Years / 35 Pictures",  through March 15th.

Graham has covered a lot of territory lo these three and half decades and Gallery 339 chose a single picture from each year summarizing his peregrinations across the Continent.  Most of these images are of the built environment and man's interaction with it and are predominated by the vernacular architecture and signage that dots mostly rural and small town America.  Many bring to mind the tall tale postcards of another era. Indeed, one image of the National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame in Hayward, WI, is a direct descendant of those Tall Tale postcards captioned "The fish are big here", which usually showed a bass filling up an entire canoe or held aloft by a fisherman who is the same size. 

Tall Tale Post Card

In Graham's take the fish are so enormous people can be seen inside the open mouth of one of them gazing over the landscape.

Huge novelty dinosaurs outside a McDonald's in Benson, AZ., or a giant black and white dairy cow tethered to a trailer looming over a parking lot south of Oshkosh, WI, typify Graham's quest for the odd or incongruous. (In the Wisconsin photo a black and white dog is seen in the foreground lapping water from a puddle, announcing to anyone insufficiently impressed merely by a big cow "Look, they're both black and white!")

There are several photographs of pictures as well, some the interiors of artists' studios with still life setups and canvases on easels, others of trompe l'oeil paintings on building walls and still others of the pictures that make up the artifacts with which people surround themselves.  In one, from Claremont, KY, a framed photograph presumably of the deceased stands next to a grave and fresh flowers.  In front of them is an image on fabric of a telephone with the receiver off the hook and the caption "Jesus Called". One might be tempted to say this subset constitutes Graham's foray into an examination of the process of making pictures itself, but the probing is strictly for effect, not insight.

There are colorful views of old cars parked in front of a garage offering batteries; multi-colored doors on motels; public monuments of canon aimed at wall murals of the Statue of Liberty; road signs out in the middle of nowhere offering "Good Luck"; football players doing drills beneath a huge tower capped by an ear of corn; and an abandoned gas station in Golden Meadow, LA,  at which the huge canopy over the pumps has partially collapsed.

Unlike the work of his best-known predecessors who focused on vernacular expression, Walker Evans in particular, Graham's work inevitably plays for the easy laugh rather than anything penetrating.   Indeed, what impresses most here is how Graham treats every subject the same without nuance or distinction, just an endless supply he needs to collect and add to the catalog.

Though he started his project nearly forty years ago, long before the age of computers, Graham's work most reminds me of today's internet jokes.  You read them and then delete them.

(A version of this piece first appeared in the Broad Street Review:  Read it here)

Tradition

Much more than just the art was moved when the Barnes Foundation relocated its collection from Merion to Philadelphia a year and a half ago. The powers-that-be also packed up and moved the attitude for which the collection was equally famous.

Many people unfortunate enough to purchase memberships in advance of opening day were more than a little miffed to discover that their privileges expired in exactly one year, even though it was months before they could first exercise them. Even more subscribers were angered when repeated phone calls and emails protesting this policy went unanswered.

One anecdote in particular stands out in underscoring just how unreasonable and outrageous the Barnes staff remains.

A friend and her out-of-town companion went to the museum on a summer weekend. Midway through their visit, both went to the rest room. When they returned by the only route available to re-enter the galleries, they were told to stand in line and wait to be admitted.

They explained that they’d already been admitted earlier and simply went to the rest room. The attendant wouldn't budge.

For years, the old Barnes restricted the number of people who could enter the institution at any given time. Even certain kinds of footwear were restricted. Visitors were eyed with suspicion. Many residents in the immediate Merion neighborhood objected to the numbers of cars (not to mention buses) parked along Latches Lane.
Apparently the new Barnes continues to view attendance as a necessary evil.

Then, of course, there are the eccentricities of the collection itself. For every fine Matisse or Cézanne, the Barnes offers mind-numbing quantities of saccharine Renoirs. For every fine Glackens, there are pedestrian others. 

Albert Barnes knew a stick in the eye when he saw one. All of that hardware sprinkled among the paintings, hinges and other pieces of medieval ironwork purporting to support his peculiar notion of art were transferred to the new location with absolutely no changes permitted.

It’s all of a piece: the bizarre theories and uneven quality of work, coupled with indifference spilling over into outright hostility. Then and now, the Barnes is no unalloyed pleasure to visit. The people who run it have maintained that tradition! 

A version of this first appeared in the Broad Street Review.

Face Time

"Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus", at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through the end of October, is exemplary of exhibitions in our era of diminished resources, relatively small, didactic shows occupying more space on the calendar if not museum walls than ever before.

While the blockbuster remains beloved of the general public and finance departments, it is simply too expensive to mount given rising insurance and shipping and the ever-growing reluctance of lenders. (It is worth noting that the huge DeKooning retrospective that just opened at MOMA occupies an entire floor, consists of nearly 200 works, and was described in the opening paragraphs of two reviews in the NY Times as being "exhaustively comprehensive, exhaustingly large and predictably awe inspiring" and "...[including]more than $4 billion worth of art: an enormously costly group of works to transport and insure, making it perhaps the most expensive exhibition in the institution’s history.")

The Philadelphia exhibition is far more modest in every respect but the one that counts: it is an illuminating reexamination of an icon nearly everyone thought he already fully understood.


Prior to Rembrandt, the traditional ways of understanding the face, indeed the whole figure, of Christ were based on officially approved sources, which included two holy relics that were considered miraculous "true" images of Jesus not made by human hands: the face on Veronica's Veil and the Mandylion (a cloth that Christ was believed to have pressed to his face).

A third reference used by artists was the Lentulus Letter believed to have been written by a fictional person, Lentulus, a governor of Judea before Pontius Pilate. In it, he described Jesus as "...a man of medium size (statura procerus, mediocris et spectabilis); he has a venerable aspect, and his beholders can both fear and love him. His hair is of the colour of the ripe hazel-nut, straight down to the ears, but below the ears wavy and curled, with a bluish and bright reflection, flowing over his shoulders. It is parted in two on the top of the head, after the pattern of the Nazarenes. His brow is smooth and very cheerful with a face without wrinkle or spot, embellished by a slightly reddish complexion. His nose and mouth are faultless. His beard is abundant, of the colour of his hair, not long, but divided at the chin. His aspect is simple and mature, his eyes are changeable and bright. He is terrible in his reprimands, sweet and amiable in his admonitions, cheerful without loss of gravity. He was never known to laugh, but often to weep. His stature is straight, his hands and arms beautiful to behold. His conversation is grave, infrequent, and modest. He is the most beautiful among the children of men."

That image had long been defined by the Mandylion of Edessa, a piece of fabric thought to contain a direct impression of Jesus’ face. Northern European painters like van Eyck took their cues from this Byzantine icon, and from apocryphal sources like the Lentulus letter: “His hair is the color of a ripe hazelnut, parted on top in the manner of the Nazirites, and falling straight to the ears but curling further below, with blonde highlights and fanning off his shoulders.”

It is thought Rembrandt was among the first to see Jesus as a Middle Eastern or Semitic face, possibly taking as his model a young man from the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam. where the artist lived. The idea of setting biblical figures and stories in local, familiar surroundings was not new. Northern European artists from the Gothic to late Renaissance had frequently painted biblical scenes using local costume and landscape.

It is thought these conventions owed less to a lack of familiarity with historical examples or worldly travel than to the impetus to make their subjects more relevant to local audiences. Surely many of these artists and their successors including Rembrandt knew of classical references from paintings and sculpture they'd seen. And even if all art were local, which it was not, artists adhered strictly to the canons when rendering the face of Jesus. Why, then, did Rembrandt break rather dramatically with these conventions?

Rembrandt never made the sojourn to Italy that many Northern European artists did. Indeed, he never left Holland. Living in Amsterdam at precisely the moment when it became the mercantile center of the globe, he let the world come to him. As such, artistic trends and worldly goods were deposited at his doorstop non-stop. The world came to Amsterdam's doorstep in all its worldly forms.

Having delighted in a cornucopia of goods being unloaded on the wharves of Amsterdam -- rugs from Asia and Asia Minor, ceramics from China, exotic maps from newly surveyed lands -- how much of a leap was it for Rembrandt to notice the young men of the immigrant Jewish population of this international city?

Above all it was the obviousness of Rembrandt's choice of a local Jewish model for his face of Jesus that stands out in this exhibition. Why wouldn't this artist who was used to, indeed collected, the exotic and quotidian of the the wide world in the shops of his adopted city look to his neighbors for models? Wasn't the Hundred Guilders Print the group expression of such a process?

Ordinary For All That

 Zoe mania, aka Zoe Strauss: Ten Years, recently began its third and final month, and when the media frenzy surrounding it finally exhausts itself, we will have witnessed the most hyped extravaganza (labels like "show" or "exhibition" being far too restrained) ever mounted by the Philadelphia Museum of Art for a local artist, living or dead.

The curator of photography, Peter Barberie, was not content merely to install the 150 photographs by Strauss in what the museum officially called a "mid-career retrospective".  He and the museum's PR machinery had their own agenda, seizing on the opportunity to market Strauss as a  one-woman outreach program aimed not only at the usual museum-going crowd but at her disenfranchised and marginalized subjects -- as well as their friends and neighbors -- many of whose visits were likely one-offs.  (Frankly, in our Twitter age that may be all the attention span a museum board should expect!)

The proceedings got underway with a lavish and raucous opening night dance party attended by thousands.  (See the obligatory YouTube here) Strauss' work was also installed on 54 billboards around town replete with a trolley tour making the rounds.  In addition, an office was set aside at the museum to allow visitors to sit and chat with the photographer.  It all had a carefully planned common touch.

The forty-two year old Strauss took an unorthodox route to the big time.  She had no formal training in either art or photography, beginning her public career by mounting photographs she'd taken in the adjacent neighborhoods on the support columns beneath I-95.  "Invitations" to this ultimate open studio went out to the hood by word-of-mouth, flyers and the internet and the show became an instant sensation and annual event.  Strauss even sold photo-copies of the pictures for $5 a piece.

The art world soon took notice.  Strauss received a PEW grant and was included in the Whitney Biennial.  She acquired a New York dealer.  In the process, she was anointed an artist of the people, for the people and by the people.  No one seemed willing to consider whether her celebrity begged a larger question: just how important is her work?

Strauss' photographs fall into four general categories:  portraits, the urban environment, signage, and graffiti.  Nearly all the images were made in Philadelphia with occasional forays to the hinterlands.  With rare exception the subject is smack dab in the middle of the frame.  Everything is meant to be simple and honest.  And it is.  Lots of people in tank tops with tattoos. Endless dilapidated store fronts seen head on. Signage, some ironic, but in a sophomoric way.  Scrawled graffiti such as "You shouldn't of taken more than you gave."  In the end, however, one should never mistake bad grammar for profundity, and therein lies the rub with Strauss' work.

The overriding approach here is of straight forward description and relentless cataloging.  There is nothing particularly artful about what she does.  Indeed, given her outsider origins it isn't surprising Strauss eschews artifice, considered composition or handsome prints, focusing solely on content, specifically the downtrodden and decay..  The work certainly isn’t original, nor is it particularly imaginative (apart from the I-95 venue).  If her intent were to evoke sympathy or offer insight into the worlds of people living hard lives in tough environments, the work falls flat, competing as it must with endless daily images of a similar persuasion to say nothing of a long tradition of concerned photography.  Strauss is empathic but apart from her subjects, those looking at the pictures are more likely to feel inured from overexposure.

Did Strauss deserve such unprecedented exposure and treatment on the merits of the work?   I'm afraid not.  There is no mistaking her sincerity, but the work fails to challenge our preconceptions or expectations or to engage us in any discovery.  Strauss' photographs are like snapshots in other peoples' albums;  we recognize them for what they are but we cannot know the stories behind them.  More to the point,  Strauss does not enlighten us or compel us to understand more. 

Since the curator considered this a mid-career treatment, one has to wonder what Strauss will do in the second half.  The guess here is more of the same.

(A version of this piece first appeared in The Broad Street Review.  Click here to see it.)

Enhanced Status

Kurt Schwitters occupies a spot in the pantheon of modernism, peripheral perhaps, but he's in there, off to one side in the wing reserved for those hard to classify.  The Color and Collage show at the Princeton University Museum of Art should  go a long way toward improving his position.

Featuring approximately 100 works, a full-scale facsimile of his Merzbau, along with some writings and sound recordings, this is the first major exhibition of his work in the United States since the retrospective at MOMA in 1985.  If it took a generation to gather these pieces from collections all over the globe, the prospect for future shows of this scope promises to get even more difficult given the insurance, logistics and related costs of such undertakings.

Organized by the Menil Collection in Houston, it is curated by Isabel Schulz, co-editor of the Kurt Schwitters catalogue raisonné and curator of the Kurt Schwitters Archive at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover.

Schwitters has long been thought of as one of the chief proponents of non-traditional media, incorporating every-day found objects into his collages and constructions.  There were precedents, to be sure, including Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning of 1912 and Duchamp's Readymades of 1913 - 17, but unlike these artists, Schwitters would make incorporation of common objects the centerpiece of his aesthetic.  As this exhibition makes clear, however, treasure-hunting, displacement and recombination were hardly the sum total of his legacy, a lesson not altogether convincingly understood by some of the artists who acknowledge his influence on them, particularly Robert Rauschenberg.  On the other hand, artists who may not have openly spoken of their debt to Schwitters, especially Joseph Cornell, shared more of his feel for color and organization than is commonly thought.  They were clearly on to something long before the Princeton show reinforced this central point: Kurt Schwitters was an image-maker whose palette included things as well as pigments and forms.

Frequently viewed in the light of Dadaism and Constructivism, in the end Schwitters was sui generis.  He coined the term merz, derived from the German word for commerce, to express his ambition to synthesize quotidian experience with art but without the nihilism and polemics of the Dadaists, nor, frankly, their posturing..

The collages and constructions that issued forth were the distillation of this ambition, the marriage of every day commerce with the more rarefied world of the studio .  The public, including many of the artists he would subsequently influence, took away only part of his message, the finding, displacement and synthesis.  This exhibition restores the full force of his vision, acknowledging his magnificent feel for color, composition and surfaces.  Schwitters may have begun with ordinary, common objects of no apparent "value", but the results were uncommonly beautiful and tranquil.  He understood it was just as reasonable to "dab" a patch of newsprint onto his "brush" as a cadmium yellow.

Schwitters also experimented with the effects produced by the glue he used, creating subtle layers above and beneath the tram tickets, newspaper clippings and product labels he incorporated.  Trained as a painter, he would embrace Modernism's challenge to Renaissance tradition by shedding the frame altogether in some of his assemblages of three-dimensional found objects.  (It is worth noting that even the frameless assemblages are presented here with newer frames around them.  Some conventions just don't die.)

Many of Schwitters better-known images are the large assemblages, bold, dimensional and masculine.  The Merzbau he built in Hanover, destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II, was the logical culmination of this strain in his work, literally a walk-in sculpture that began in one room in his home and extended finally to six of them.  The reconstruction of a single room in Princeton relied on the few extant photographs of the original but is forced to leave out many of the surface details and objects the source pictures' fuzziness and distance could not reveal.

Naturally, the walls of the "room" have no right angles as their surfaces organically veer off in multiple directions, a variation on this framelessness.  And just as naturally, the logical extension here was Schwitters' literal combination of every-day life, his own living space, and his art.  In the end, however, this facsimile, stripped of most of the color and ordinary objects he incorporated, barely hints at the culminating spirit of the original, the dichotomies of messy, chaotic, random life and ordered, considered, practiced art.

Had this survey stopped here, it would have fulfilled its organizers' dream, the bringing about of a reassessment of Schwitters' importance; however, there is much more in Princeton to enhance his value.  Included are several collaborative lithographs made with a commercial printing establishment in which Schwitters combined his own drawings with portions of advertisements from previously printed litho stones lying about, i.e., found in, the printing plant.

Along with samples of his written work (poems, essays, childrens' stories), the gallery is filled with the sounds of Schwitters reciting his phonetic poem “Ursonate,” or “Sonata in Primeval Sounds.”  Nonsensical sounds usher forth in a staccato pattern beneath a large series of photographs of the artist himself, arranged on the wall, repetitive themselves save for subtle changes in facial expression.

This audible accompaniment to the overall experience of standing in front of and walking into Schwitters' art underscores his insistence on a total experience that makes no distinction in forms or media or where they come from.  There aren't many artists about whom that can be said, even those in the pantheon.

Street Find

The photography world is all agog over the emerging  trove of astonishing pictures by a heretofore unknown street photographer, Vivian Maier, and there is something deliciously appropriate about the role the internet is playing in spreading her posthumous fame.

Miss Maier, who died a few years ago at the age of 83, is simultaneously the subject of a very flattering piece in the New York Times (online), a profile in Chicago Magazine, a show at the Chicago Cultural Center and several blogs.

She is also the subject of a televised interview showing, where else, on YouTube, conducted with the chief guardian and most likely beneficiary of her work.  Moreover, she is the subject line in thousands of emails from photographers, curators and admirers of the medium, most of whose messages begin with a variation on "Have you seen this amazing stuff?!".

Born in New York in 1926 to a French mother and Austrian father, she lived off and on in the U.S. and France many years before settling in the States for good in 1951.  In the mid-fifties she moved to Chicago where for the next forty years she worked for various families as a nanny.

Some time around 1930, Maier and her mother appear to have lived briefly with Jeanne Bertrand, a successful portrait photographer, but little else about that relationship or influence is known.  What remains of her personal effects included a number of monographs of photographers.   What we know of her years as a nanny can be read and heard in various interviews with former employers and charges alike.

Whatever else propelled Maier to take pictures remains something of a mystery.

Maier is hardly the first photographer to work the streets, but she is that rarity among those who command our attention precisely because she appears never to have sought it.  How much she knew about  contemporary photographers is unknown at this time. The monographs found among her possessions and a well-documented penchant for routinely taking the children under her care to cultural events strongly suggest she was familiar with at least some of them..  Moreover, she lived in one of the major photographic centers in the country at a time when Harry Callahan and Ray Metzker among others were actively working.  One can clearly see echoes of Callahan, Weegee, Diane Arbus, August Sander and other contemporaries in her work but these similarities may be due as much to period dress, a square format, and a preponderance of odd, eccentric characters in the city as to conscious emulation.


The freshness of her vision is undeniable.  Maier's sense of light and composition is impressive.  Her feel for humor and irony is Gallic and profound.  (The French, in particular, always see right through Americans on their home turf.  Witness the work of Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, who was Swiss.)

Apparently, on her days off Maier walked the streets of Chicago, Rolleiflex in hand.  No neighborhood nor subject was off limits to her. She was as likely to photograph women in mink stoles standing on downtown streets as a young boy riding an over-sized horse underneath the Loop.  She was also as likely to photograph herself reflected in the mirror of a cigarette vending machine.  Self-portraits abound, her camera nearly always visible, as if she would occasionally pause to record herself as the artist she aspired to be but perhaps could not quite bring  herself to believe she was.

The sheer range of her subject matter and sensibility further underscores that Maier worked with few apparent conscious constraints, particularly of audience.  The thousands of unprinted negatives she left along with hundreds of undeveloped rolls of film strongly suggest she was too busy looking to worry about being seen.

Traditional Stroke

If there are two disciplines graduates of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts value above all others they are drawing and painting. According to Claes Oldenburg, however, similarly inclined artists are in short supply elsewhere.

The Academy and Oldenburg announced recently the famous Pop artist would produce an enormous sculpture of a paint brush and dollop of paint for the new Lenfest Plaza planned for the block of Cherry Street directly across from the towering extension to the PA Convention Center and between PAFA's original building and the Hamilton Building.

The sculpture will rise 53 feet and be pitched at a 60 degree angle over the sidewalk fronting Broad Street with the dollop of paint on the ground below and illuminated bristles at night. It is doubtful this looming instant cliche will intimidate pedestrians as some fear, but it seems certain the dollop will eventually take on the color of a palette on which too many colors have been mixed.  Perhaps funding will be available to periodically repaint the dollop.

In describing the impetus behind the work, Oldenburg decried the lack of interest in painting among today's young artists and expressed the hope his planned piece would remind visitors, students and passersby of its primacy. The guess here is few observers will be persuaded.

Oldenburg is well known to city residents for his Clothespin at Center Square, directly across from City Hall, and the lesser seen Split Button on the campus at Penn. The former has long held a special place for city residents, especially those looking for an easily identifiable meeting spot downtown. Installed in1976, the Clothespin spoke volumes to a culture so imbued with the Pop phenomena that commercial enterprises had already gladly taken over the role of transforming everyday pop icons into consumer goods. Nearly 35 years later, however, this sort of illusionism no longer excites the imagination.

The issue here is hardly one of questioning the value of a foundation rooted in painting and drawing; rather, it concerns the particular kinds of painting and drawing that result from such training. In PAFA's case the emphasis remains squarely on the most academic approach. As such, the proposed Oldenburg sculpture seems more likely to underscore the conservative initiatives of the sponsoring institution that prefers looking backwards than to spur new commitments if not directions.

Follow up:  The reality is far worse than the renderings.  The brush itself is a pasty orange and the dollop on the ground is a huge mound.  It's hard to imagine anyone would willingly set his course for this travesty as a meeting place. 

Minor Show

Spring time and baseball, perfect together; and what better time to mount a show of portraits of aspiring baseball players than the season in which hope if not actual prospects for success spring eternal? Gallery 339 is currently showing Andrea Modica's "Minor League", B&W photographs taken in the early 1990's of ballplayers in the Yankees' farm system.

These portraits reveal little other than a mostly bored-looking bunch of young men lounging around, stuck in the low minors and unlikely to rise. If participation in sports builds character, little if any is much in evidence here. Bad food, long bus rides and less than ideal playing conditions describe the life of most minor leaguers and Modica's portraits succeed merely in contributing to the drabness.

Among those pictured here are catcher Jorge Posada, who did reach stardom in the big leagues, and slugger Daryl Stawberry, in a Dodgers uniform no less. (Someone should tell Modica that Yankess and Dodgers don't mix...ever!) Since Strawberry began his big league career with the Mets in 1983, was traded to LA in 1991 and to the Yankees in 1993, it's hard to fathom what his portrait is doing here among the hopefuls other than to possibly raise the overall level of Modica's game. It doesn't.

Minor League indeed!