Rudy Burckhardt

Rudy Burckhardt: New York Photographs
Curated by Vincent Katz
Tibor de Nagy Gallery
May 1 - June 6, 2003

Rudy Burckhardt's Maine: An Exhibition of Photographs, Paintings, and Films
Curated by Vincent Katz
New York Studio School Gallery
May 8 - June 21, 2003

By DEBORAH GARWOOD

 

Rudy Burckhardt Coca-Cola Goddess 1947
gelatin-silver print, 8¼ x 9½ inches
This and all images, Estate of Rudy Burckhardt, courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York

Rudy Burckhardt's career dates from 1935 to 1999. Working in the mediums of photography, art films, and collaborative dance and theatre experiments while continuing his own, less well known realist painting, his work has found an important if underground niche in American 20th century modernism. The mix of disciplines was not a good gestalt in this era; by temperament he eluded definition; yet he became something of a cult figure during the heyday of the New York School. The value of his versatility and its relationship to cross-disciplinary practices by later artists remains to be measured more fully.

Recently, two concurrent shows provided new insight into Burckhardt's versatile oeuvre. Together, these contrast, or reconcile, the Swiss-born expatriate's public persona as a photographer with his more personal artistic expression up in Maine each summer from 1956 to 1999, the year of his death.

Rudy Burckhardt's photographs of New York on ordinary days in the 1930s and 1940s still offer plenty to see, read, and observe in 2003. The selection of 36 vintage prints displayed at Tibor de Nagy, the largest of which was 13" x 10", had surfaces beautifully rich in silver that were as anachronistic as the details of dress and commercial graphic design. Curated from the artist's estate by Vincent Katz, the group portrayed New York urban life as a dense environment of text, pedestrians, and visual rhythms. In a delightful catalogue published for the uptown show, Robert Storr's essay comments that Burckhardt is "free of the grotesquerie of Baudelaire" and John Ashbery notes that the images are "splendidly wry and witty, but never patronizing, and in fact deeply empathic and humane."

Eagle Barbershop c. 1938
gelatin-silver print 9¼ x 12½ inches

Burckhardt reputedly got more out of the live moments of shooting than darkroom work. Titles like Haircut 20 cents, Waffles, and Sidewalk IV convey a burlesque routine of eating, reading, walking, and riding not unlike life today except for the props. In these shots, a straightforward vantage point perpendicular to the flow of sidewalk traffic facilitates his deadpan sense of humor.
Pedestrians cut across arrays of storefront window signs like actors past painted flats during the opening vamp of a Broadway musical. Men often get caught in repeating patterns of graphics that bleat the price of a malted milk or list a litany of hot platters at a coffee shop. The status of retail management at a vacant storefront space mocks or lures them with economic opportunity, or the loss of it (Reopen Soon, 1939). Meanwhile, a woman's knee-length ring patterned dress be-bops with ring patterns in the sidewalk expanse she's crossing (Rings, 1940). Groups of men and women appear in unchoreographed modern dances set in sunlit public places. The sidewalk dance floor is the threshold between skyscraper heights and the subway's rattling depths.

New York storefronts perpetually beckon absent customers in need of readymade solutions. The Eagle Barber Shop displays a poster for hair tonic that sings "There's Romance in the Hair" to remedy the couple's balding (his) and dandruff (hers) (Eagle Barbershop, c. 1938). A huge billboard sign on Astor Place, in a photo entitled Coca Cola Goddess (1947), urges the populace skittering below her to Have A Coke. At a newsstand thickly stocked with Spy and Detective magazines, the portrait of a tiny, bald headed man on the cover of Life Magazine might go unnoticed but for Burckhardt's outing of him in the title, Mussolini (1940). A sharp needle in the cultural haystack if ever there was one.

High in the air, buildings carry on a life of their own. Flatiron Building, Summer (1947) catches the wedge-shaped landmark making an hourglass silhouette with its own shadow one endless afternoon while sunlight obliterates the flanking avenues. One skyscraper's cracked cement caryatid, her hair pulled up in a corinthian plinth as if in curlers, casts her besooted gaze over the ratio of skyscraper to airspace like a guardian zoning official (Caryatid is the only image from the 1950s.)

Burckhardt has a way of suggesting that movement through the city can be a simple end in itself or, with a bit of reflection on cues within the chaos, it can mix with both deep and fanciful interpretations of life. Under the sidewalks of New York, his subway compositions are portentous without being grim. Dante-esque figures set in the inky black depths of subway cars clutch at white vertical poles, sit lost in thought under All-Bran signs, or engross themselves in newspapers as they speed through oblivion. Only one rider registers his objection to the camera. Burckhardt spars by giving him the title: Subway Hey! (1947). The mobility and speed of handheld cameras was still something new in the social environment of mid 1940s New York.

Flat Iron Building, Summer 1947
gelatin-silver print, 11 x 9 inches

Little in the way of a didactic reading seems intended in Burckhardt's work. Interviews suggest that he believed in the camera's potential to record a live scene, like a documentary photographer; yet he clearly took pleasure in his creativity and selectivity as an interpreter. As street photography goes, Burckhardt is sometimes compared to Walker Evans or Berenice Abbott, though his approach is too informal to make a good fit. Robert Frank, a slightly younger, fellow Swiss-born contemporary, likewise trained in precision techniques and heir to European street photography, oriented his practice toward ethereal yet visionary images that best convey their message in groups. His sensibility seems far from Rudy's as well.

Burckhardt stands alone by temperament, but also by virtue of his diverse practice in photography, film, collaborative projects over a long career. It's tempting to attribute the light handed sophistication of his oeuvre, at least in part, to his lifelong friendship with the prolific dance critic and poet Edwin Denby. Burckhardt, Swiss by birth, and Denby, born in China to an American diplomat but educated at an elite private school in the US, met in Switzerland and migrated to New York together in 1935. Denby, after earning a degree in gymnastics in Austria in the 1920s, had applied his craft to experimental modernist dance performances in Germany as of 1929, and returned to New York already familiar with the extensive social milieu of transatlantic avant garde personalities at work in the city. He was well suited to critique both traditional dance and new forms emerging from artistic cross currents. His column for the Herald Tribune reveals in retrospect that he was as adept at reviewing Nijinsky as Balanchine/Stravinsky, African dance, or Martha Graham. Denby wrote an essay in 1954 for an audience of Julliard dance majors entitled "Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets" which has since become noted. In it he credits Burckhardt with teaching him to see the city. A sense of how mutual the inspiration between the two men really was comes through in Burckhardt's photographs of buildings, figures and text adroitly caught on the fly in his street photography. Their friendship was woven so deeply into both lives that poem, photo and painting titles echo between works set in locales from urban capitals the world over to woodsy settings in Maine.

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