Art

The show
“New York, N. Why?: Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, 1937–1940,”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sept 23–Jan 4

THE BACKGROUND
Born in Switzerland, Rudy Burckhardt moved to New York City in 1935 and quickly befriended the poets, painters and composers of Gotham’s artistic scene. He was a polymath, a prolific filmmaker and painter, as well as a photographer. “He was the original Renaissance man,” notes Douglas Eklund, assistant curator in the Met’s department of photographs. Burckhardt’s strongest suit, however, was photography, and yet, for all of his talents, he didn’t care about public recognition. He was probably best known for a series of shots of artists working in their studios, taken for ARTnews magazine.

THE TALENT
“New York, N. Why?” was a series Burckhardt began a few years after arriving in New York, and it breaks down into three categories: pictures of building facades, images of ads and storefronts, and pictures of pedestrians. They departed from similar images taken by Walker Evans and others, because of their refusal to make a statement about their subjects. “The street was for social commentators,” Eklund observes. “Burckhardt was into weight, balance, form—painterly issues. If he depicted advertising or aspects of mass culture, he did so without comment. Evans kind of sniffed at him for this.”

THE SIGNIFICANCE
Burckhardt was more interested in locating the city’s subliminal choreography. “He loved the fact that Americans had a certain style of walking confidently,” Eklund says. “He captured the unconscious artistic expression of the individual and a New York which no longer exists.” In this respect, the poet John Ashbery had it right when he described Burckhardt as “practically a subterranean monument.”

NEXT SHOW: “William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961–2008,” »

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