Photos from the Past
RAYNOR, VIVIEN
On Art PHOTOS FROM THE PAST BY VIVIEN RAYNOR At a dinner party given by a nouveau English millionairess, the actress Francoise Rosay was treated to a lengthy blast of Francophilia from her...
...Noren indicate that she has not been overwhelmed by studying with Diane Arbus...
...Francophilia has been something of a bore, and the backlash against it is understandable...
...Noren, a Bennington graduate, projects much sensitivity...
...In their way, they are as corny as the visions of Norman Rockwell, but at least they aren't heart-warming...
...I suspect it was as much the preoccupation with French art among the American cognoscenti as the art itself that caused so great a reaction among U.S...
...a raddled old prostitute, encrusted with finery...
...In addition, the introduction is somewhat distracting, for Ms...
...The scenery is mostly urban -storefronts, the humanoid shadow cast by Pilier de Metro at night, a fluffy white dog descending a long flight of sunlit steps beside a brick embankment, exfoliating masonry scored by graffiti-and each print has an elegant compositional point to make...
...with his biretta-like cap, he resembles a French priest...
...On Art PHOTOS FROM THE PAST BY VIVIEN RAYNOR At a dinner party given by a nouveau English millionairess, the actress Francoise Rosay was treated to a lengthy blast of Francophilia from her hostess, who was deploring that she had not been born French at the time of Louis XIV...
...Brassai's technique is immaculate, with even the buildings looking as if he had spent many preliminary hours posing them...
...Compulsory service in Germany's World War I army is briefly represented, and then we follow this middle-class family on through 20th-century history, watching them dress their children prettily, take their pleasure on the seashore and, like others elsewhere, remain oblivious to the signs and portents...
...This collection, too, is a blend of history and nostalgia, but its intent is modest...
...Noren's maternal grandparents, Meta and Moritz Wallach, who were, respectively, the fifth of seven children and the seventh of ten...
...Noren and her branch of the family wound up in Australia, where they look every bit as insecure as they must have felt...
...Such musing throws no light on a group of people who are, after all, her relatives and not ours...
...A glance at the reproductions in his book suggests, at the very least, that someone is not telling the whole truth...
...Besides yielding the fine nocturnal pictures that comprised his first book, Paris de Nuit, these early years brought him valuable social contacts...
...dance hall scenes, featuring girls with pomaded kiss-curls...
...Rosay halted the conversation by observing: "But, Lady K., in 18th-century France you would have been in the kitchen...
...For instance, the one accompanying the picture of a great-uncle, taken in 1908, tells us that he "recites" a poem at his brother's wedding...
...After moving to Paris in 1923, he scratched a living by writing for Hungarian newspapers and did not turn seriously to photography until the '30s...
...Coinciding with the publication of a portfolio, the current exhibition is a survey of the '30s and '40s...
...A tableau taken at a Swiss finishing school, where the young ladies are dotted around in groups against a painted backcloth of trees and buildings with figures, is so composed that the viewer cannot tell for certain who is painted and who is real...
...His bulky figure, with one hand reaching into his jacket pocket, is surmounted by a jowly, saturnine face...
...Particularly striking for its implications is the photo of a boat returning from a seal hunt, with family and crew grouped around two appallingly human-like corpses, one of whose shapely heads lies across a hunter's foot...
...Vollard reacted quite strongly against another picture taken by Brassai, begging him to destroy the negative...
...In the human interest category, for example, one finds all the usual proletarian studies: a porter from Les Halles, majestic in his corpulence...
...Hospitable as that country is to strangers, its climate and mores can be a jolt even to English-speaking immigrants...
...Henri Matisse is shown sitting characteristically close to a nude model, studying her torso as if he were a doctor-an impression enhanced by the white coat over his business suit...
...Standard Victorian group portraits establish that it is a prosperous and handsome family (the great-grandparents owned a dry goods store...
...It would be unfair to compare the Brassai show with Catherine Noren's The Camera of My Family at the Jewish Museum in New York (through September 3...
...the subject, however, is very clearly engaged in cleaning an Army boot and wears the fatigues of the period...
...He gave no specific reason, but the photographer speculates in his book, Picasso and Company, that it was because the photo showed copies of a Maillol nude the dealer had contracted to reproduce-far in excess of the number agreed upon...
...We are left to seek out the ironies and, through them, to recognize the various stages of this second diaspora...
...That indefatigable praiser of famous men, Roland Penrose, claims Brassai's drawings have "delighted many people, including Picasso...
...The beard is stubbly, the nose bulbous and the eyes very penetrating...
...A musically inclined male relative of the same period is shown standing triumphantly with one leg on a bearskin: The pose whimsically suggests he bagged the animal with the clarinet he holds gunlike under his arm...
...Appropriately, Henry Miller, superswinger, is posed in a doorway, looking very transient and romantic in wide fedora and rumpled raincoat...
...another of a line of children stacked along a counter like dolls in a store...
...The accompanying portraits by Ms...
...Less typical but historically noteworthy is the double portrait of Salvador Dali and his wife Gala, taken in 1932, soon after she had left the poet Paul Eluard for the painter who was to save the visual side of a sagging Surrealist movement...
...Consulate for a visa...
...Noren, a professional photographer who will be publishing a book later this year, has gathered together family portraits and snapshots dating back to 1871 and covering six generations...
...Upon reaching adulthood, he was admitted to the family business meetings...
...Noren identifies as her Uncle Rolf, emerges as a rather likable character...
...the one of her grandmother smiling and swallowing a drink is particularly lovely...
...It was a provident move, for the year was 1928...
...Then the art magazine Minotaure began publishing his photographs and soon he was being exhibited in many countries...
...He himself liked the picture because it made him look relatively jovial...
...The scenario begins in northern Germany and the main characters are Ms...
...artists...
...Judging from this and the selection of small carved torsos on display at the gallery, there can be Utile doubt that Brassai's proper medium is photography...
...Through it he can fully express his intelligence, acute powers of observation and gift for balance and harmony...
...One of Brassai's greatest pictures is of Ambro'ise Vollard, the art dealer who produced limited editions...
...Born in 1899 in a Transylvanian town whose Hungarian name he took for his own, Brassai' studied art in Berlin...
...This boy, whom Ms...
...Then there is the famous picture of Samuel Beckett where the pale predator's eyes and rumpled "feathers" of hair make him almost indistinguishable from an eagle...
...Though most of the reasons for Francophilia and Francophobia alike have by now withered away, it is interesting to see the former still operating in the photographs of Brassai', on display at the Witkin Gallery in New York City (through August 19...
...After his first attempt at speaking was summarily squashed by his father, he left the room and went to the U.S...
...Yet, except for a picture of a store draped for a Hitler parade, there are no direct references to the reign of terror...
...The distressed expression on the face of a young boy is attributed to a love of animals...
...In this exhibition he has created a useful documentary and a reminder that there are sound reasons for Francophilia...
...and, of course, the Lesbian couple on the town...
...Another significant study shows a couple about to take a ride in one of those tourer automobiles that were to become a metaphor for Nazism...
...As a small slice of German history, the show raises the question of whether evidence gathered unconsciously can be prophetic, or only seems so through hindsight...
...The idea is a good one, but the captions are sometimes confusing...
...Even Marcel Duchamp's anti-art acquired a special fillip in this country because it provided legitimate release for an emotion not too far from proletarian envy...
...By his own admission, he led the usual Bohemian existence filled with late-night talk and intense relationships...
...the expression around his soft-lipped mouth presages the quality later made famous by Humphrey Bo-gart...
...Despite deriving much from France, the spirit of most postwar American work has been anti-French, anti-classical and anti-good taste...
...Though the magnetism of his famous sitters helps to make the portraits Brassai's best efforts, he was clearly most responsive to them and their work...
...An adjoining plate strikes an anthropological note, featuring one child held by a wet nurse dressed in elaborate peasant costume, complete with headdress...
...He also covers the full repertoire of photographic inspirations...
...In a terminal state of exasperation, the story goes, Mile...
...Many of the snapshots are fascinating on purely artistic grounds: one, for instance, of two little girls that could be a tiny Sargent portrait...
...They stand in an affectionate pose beside a painted plaster bust near a doorway, tanned and happy...
...Dali is almost pretty in his boyishness-This was before he assumed the mustache and manic glare...
...she likes to ask imaginative, rhetorical questions along the lines of, "Why is that book in my grandmother's lap...
Vol. 56 • July 1973 • No. 15
