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"Rudy Burckhardt and friends" at the Grey Art Gallery and "Remembering Rudy" at Tibor de Nagy - photographs and films - Brief Article
Art in America, Feb, 2001 by Alfred Corn
This past year we've seen a biography of Fairfield Porter and a show of his paintings, a touring exhibition dealing with Frank O'Hara and his visual-artist friends [see A.i.A., Feb. `00], and now these two shows presenting the life and work of Rudy Burckhardt. All of which suggests a renewal of interest in the cohesive group of artists and poets sometimes called the New York School. A few of the surviving members--John Ashbery, Jane Freilicher, Alex Katz--rank among our most celebrated contemporaries. Photographer Rudy Burckhardt, who died just a year ago, was probably the least well known of the group, and yet in some ways the most central, given that he seems to have been liked and admired by all the others. The paradox is that he began as an outsider. Born in Basel to a distinguished Swiss family that included the Renaissance art historian Jakob Burckhardt, the young aspirant left his home city as soon as an inheritance allowed him to; he settled definitively in New York in 1935. His friend, the dance critic and poet Edwin Denby introduced him to the New York art scene, which, along with the city itself, eventually became his primary subject matter.
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The Grey Art Gallery exhibition included Burckhardt's photographs and 16mm films, placed alongside paintings and sculptures by artists he knew and photographed. Burckhardt was the house photographer for Art News in the `50s and early `60s and produced intimate portraits for photo-essays on de Kooning, Rothko, Porter and Joan Mitchell. At the Grey, exhibition vitrines displayed several of these feature articles, which the curators in a few instances triangulated with the original photographs and paintings. The resulting time warp eerily juxtaposed that day's perception of the artists as innovative newcomers and our current view of them as acknowledged classics from an earlier period.
The sense of time travel was accentuated in Burckhardt's short films. The nonnarrative examples that were screened document a New York City of waterfronts and backstreets that have since been drastically altered, as well as the pre-Disney Times Square. Burckhardt's narrative films, done more in the spirit of fun, are charged with nostalgia even so, because of the "actors" who make cameo appearances or have starring roles in them. To recognize a young Aaron Copland dressed as a roof repairman, or Paul Bowles as a spectator in a burlesque theater, or John Ashbery as a skinny baseball player, produces an extra comic dimension that may or may not have been foreseen. by the filmmaker. Comic, but also sobering, when we recall that many of these budding film stars have since died.
The Tibor de Nagy Gallery mounted an impressive selection of Burckhardt's city and country photographs, plus a group of portraits of him by such friends as Katz and Duncan Hannah. In his available-light exposures of cityscapes, signboards, pedestrians and subway commuters, Burckhardt owes something to Walker Evans, though he is cooler, more off-hand. Playing down the artistic image, he allows ordinary experience to emerge without heavy-handed interference or theoretical tendentiousness.
"Rudy Burckhardt and Friends: New York Artists of the 1950s and `60s" appeared at the Grey Art Gallery [May 9-July 15, 2000] and will travel to the Middlebury College of Art, Middlebury, Vt. [Jan. 16-Mar. 18, 2001]. It is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Vincent Katz and Rob Storr. "Remembering Rudy" was shown at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York [June 14-July 28, 2000].
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COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
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