THE NEW YORK TIMES • Friday, June 23, 2000

 

ART REVIEW

 

Faces of Youthful Artists From a Faceless Insider

 

By John Russell

 

            One of the summer's freshest and most rewarding exhibitions is "Rudy Burckhardt and Friends: New York Artists of the 1950's and 1960's" at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University.  It may not sound like a grabber:  downtown no longer has the open-minded and almost collegial interconnectedness it had 40 and 50 years ago.  Marketing, salesmanship and hype have sprouted all over.  And Burckhardt was never a "celebrity" in the post-Warhol sense of the word.

            Nor did he wish to be.  But he was, as the poet and critic Vincent Katz says in the show's catalog, "simultaneously the ultimate 'insider' and a disinterested observer," who got on as well with poets as with painters, composers, choreographers and avant-garde moviemakers.

            He was best known as a photographer who for many years took New York City as his main subject and recorded it in an ever-observant and subtly original way.  He got everything just right, whether he was stalking a bygone Times Square at dusk in 1948 or surveying Astor Place from a high window in 1947 or dropping in on Willem de Kooning when he was working on his great "Woman, I" in 1950.

            Thanks to commissions from Thomas B. Hess, he made a portrait gallery of rising artists for Art News magazine, and it is an irreplaceable document of its day.

            This he did (as in his portraits of Willem and Elaine de Kooning) with a tenderness peculiar to himself.  Many of his portraits have a lingering poetry that his heightened by the fact that so many of the sitters were still young with faces unlined by the travail of aging and with bodies still lithe and slender.  When we look at Joan Mitchell as he painted her in 1957, we recognize her as the rambunctious talker who had painted a picture, now in this show, called "George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, but It Got Too Cold."

            Between 1936 and 1997 Burckhardt made 95 avant-garde movies, 9 of which are being screened at the Grey Gallery.  No two were alike, and he could do things that no other moviemaker would have thought of.  (In one, Aaron Copland plays the part of a young painter and Paul Bowles and Virgil Thomson make fleeting appearances as moviegoers.)

            What makes this show wonderful is, first, the discretion of Burckhardt.  He never jockeyed for "importance."  In 1950, when Tom Hess asked him to photograph Jackson Pollock at work, he went ahead and made the revelatory images that are in this exhibition.  But it was not in his nature to exploit them as the key images that they were to become.

            Burckhardt contradicted himself at every turn.  Though he was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1914 and bore one of the great Swiss family names, he made nothing of it and detested Basel, which he once summed up as "lonely and empty and proper and clean."  (He once said of Paris that although he liked being there, it was "not far enough from Basel.")

            In 1935, when he turned 21, he had a legacy that enabled him to live wherever he liked.  His first visit to New York in that year and at that susceptible age had such an overwhelming effect upon him that it was two years before he felt able to use his camera there.  The sheer size, the energy, the life of the streets -- all astounded him.

            Burckhardt never promoted himself as "a friend of...."  But when he was drafted into the American Army in 1941, de Kooning gave him a little gouache that he kept with him in his locker until he obtained an honorable discharge (on grounds of "nervous disability") some years later.  The present exhibition is rich in diminutive but telling souvenirs of the years when, as is said by Vincent Katz, the co-curator of the show with Lynn Gumpert, "the New York art world was a private place.  There was little money involved, only the intensity of the work itself."

            In that private world, Burckhardt became an indispensable presence, prized by all who knew him.  Like his lifelong friend, Edwin Denby, the foremost American dance critic of the day, he had a sense of quality that never deserted him.

            The particular magic of this show is related to the sumptuous array of paintings that have been brought out primarily from the collection of New York University.  This collection is, as Ms. Gumpert says, "little-known and rarely seen."

            But in the context of the New York School and of those of its early members who were friends of Burckhardt, it makes a stunning effect.  That impact is heightened by _________ from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, where Seymour Knox was an early and discerning patron of the New York School.

            There are paintings here that are indeed little known and for that reason come across with their freshness intact and enhanced.  One is the very large (80 by 68 inches) "Farm Scene, 1963" by Jane Freilicher.  Another is the memorably violent painting of a bull by Elaine de Kooning.  Painted in 1958 when she was teaching in Albuquerque and was going every weekend to the bullfights in Juárez, Mexico, this has a headlong, tearaway abandon.

            The fact that paintings like these are shown with Burckhardt's seemingly casual portraits of the artists gives the visitor a sense of domesticity.  It is as if we were making studio visits, 40 or more years ago, and were welcome to stay as long as we liked.

            The Tibor de Nagy Gallery has a smaller but concentrated show of photographs by Burckhardt, dated from 1940 to the year of his death, 1999.  Between the extremes of still life in close-up and views of the far distances of New York, it gives very good grounding in its enormous subject.

            It also has a smaller room filled with reminiscences of Burckhardt's friends.  Among them, Alex Katz, Red Grooms, Duncan Hannah and Avigail Schimmel stand out.