On Art

...From their clean shaven and kempt appearance, it is obvious these have already been absorbed...

...Few gourmet restaurants today could rruster such Shaker-like elegance or even tolerate the wastage of space between tables...

...In fact, the recent allocation of moneys to research the feasibility of using rooftops in New York for growing plants or recreational activities is especially ironic in view of the photo here of a rooftop playground one of many that still dot the city in use nearly a century ago...

...It is almost as though the very souls of the new Americans were closer to the surface...

...Late Nicolas de Stael comes to mind...

...I'm not sure "we" are quite so sophisticated...

...Anyway, these muscular, bearded men, posing with anvil or sledgehammer, would have earned excellent marks in British surveys of the time...

...Law and order is further symbolized by the picture of prison inmates seated at long tables...

...Daylight coming through the windows, over his left shoulder, and a potted palm in the corner of the room complete the picture...

...Still, most of these subjects must have been under severe strain, if not in trauma, and being photographed barely off the boat could not have been an especially soothing experience...

...Perhaps the pictures gathered by Professor Pea-body were originally meant to encourage the genteel to support charitable endeavors by showing the progress that had already been made...

...Peasants and country people in general, as most of them appear to be, also look different from their urban counterparts...

...If they can't be considered "realistic," they still speak of a spirit that no longer seems to exist in the community...

...But that says more about where we are than where we were...

...As Szarkowski has also pointed out, Johnston made an idyll of labor the study of a girl ironing, for instance, is flawlessly composed, down to the very flounce that breaks the horizontal edge of the board so artfully...

...For those who proved recalcitrant, there was always the Tombs, whose warden is captured here in all his corpulent mustached majesty, sitting before a rolltop desk with two telephones yet...

...Yet we are now discovering we are less attractive than ever without the sense of duty people once had toward one another, no matter how insincere it may have been...

...The heads look upward, mouths open from the final scream and ears flopped piteously over the edge of the tabletop...

...Hardly a show at all, the 50-odd prints on display were skimmed from a larger exhibition at the university last year that was drawn from 6,000 pictures amassed by Professor F. G. Peabody...

...Either that or poverty was a lot more artistic in those days than we have been led to suppose...

...It shows a crowd of foreign-born youths, all well coated and booted, listening to an older man imparting, with upraised hand, "American Standards...

...Titzenthaler contributes the one ghastly picture in the show, whose subject is animals rather than humans...

...The ornately papered Edwardian rooms, sometimes furnished sparsely but always solidly, look spacious, light and in mint condition...

...She was the author of The Hampton Album, a picture story of the coeducational establishment of the same name that was founded for blacks and Indians after the Civil War...

...Naturally, the photographs of Frances Benjamin Johnston stand out in this context...

...Meanly constructed as some of them are, in their time they were a creditable attempt to house a rapidly expanding proletariat...

...T m he miscellany of artisan types photographed in Germany by Waldemar Fritz Herman Titzentha-ler has little to do with the rest of the exhibition...

...Because of the buildings' old-fashioned appearance, it takes an effort to realize that they were relatively new when the pictures were taken...

...Blondness and bellicosity rated high, though the former could be waived if the latter was well enough developed...

...Meanwhile, the slaughterhouse workers go about their tasks smiling and chatting with each other...

...To a contemporary social worker, the picture in the show of women streaming down the steps of a building each carrying a potted plant given them by the National Plant, Flower and Fruit Guild?would probably seem farcical...

...But the English too And not without reason, considering their overseas holdings?were dreadfully partial to categorizing peoples by their ethnic characteristics as well as by their cleanliness and moral fiber...

...Peabody, who founded a social ethics department at Harvard in 1906, saw photography as a tool that could be used to accelerate reform by documenting the conditions under which the poor lived, particularly the immigrant poor...

...Nonetheless, a shot taken at the Young Men's Benevolent Association, presumably in New York, makes the process very clear...

...In any event, good works have become institutionalized...

...Even quainter is an accompanying photo of the factory itself, where rows of girls sit opposite each other, clad in striped gowns and frilly caps...

...The mother, probably younger than she looks, is nevertheless a beauty under her upswept hair, and she fills most of the picture, surrounded by domestic confusion????A clutter of clothing, newspapers and furniture, including a sewing machine...

...For some reason the light in old photographs of "ethnological types" invariably strikes the upper part of the eyeball, imparting a manic expression to the face...

...In another context Szarkowski has described her as the "drill sergeant" of women photographers because of the way she transfixed groups into tableaux of such immobility...

...There are groups of "partly Americanized" immigrants, but they don't look too different from the "newly arrived" ones...

...Here, young black women in caps and gingham dresses are frozen in domestic tasks like upholstering...

...Whether or not we "believe" a photograph, we tend to accept it, knowingly or not...

...In the picture entitled Twins when they began to take modified milk, the milk evidently had not yet begun to have its effect, for the two little tadpoles are badly shriveled...

...All three subjects are staring at the camera as intensely as if it were a human being...

...Professor Peabody's purpose notwithstanding, the photos tend to portray the poor after receiving help rather than before...

...Whether or not government-administrated antipoverty programs do a better job, they do provide employment for the sociology majors who run them...

...The faces, both male and female, are amazingly asymmetrical, with bone structures very clearly drawn...

...It can make us feel we have faced truth, when all it has actually done is create a distance between us and the truth, rendering it tolerable...

...One wonders how, in 70 years, such visages could have so totally disappeared from the cities' human landscape...

...Seated at a desk before a bottle of malt vinegar and a wall covered with advertisements, he is working on a watercolor...

...The Artist's Studio features the then designer of H. J. Heinz' posters and labels, whose lettering and layout have not changed since around 1900...

...To John Szarkowski, director of moma's department of photography, the idea seems a shade naive...

...Most of the prints seem to have been chosen with at least one eye to their "esthetic prejudices," for the scenes depicted are, with a single exception, far from upsetting...

...Two freshly killed pigs lie supine on tables, their throats slit and entrails protruding from their riven carcasses...

...This, in turn, helps us to play the old game of perceiving art when we should be concentrating on meaning...

...It consists of a row of three portable enameled bowls on a washstand, over which hangs a pipe terminating in a faucet...

...This may have originated in Germany where, in the 18th century, the system of skull classification was invented...

...In back hang rows of their fellows, cleaned and ready for market...

...For example, one of the loveliest pieces here is of a lodging-house washroom in Paris, a city where even the walls peel creatively...

...They are placing pickles into jars, while an overseer hovers in the background...

...Today, we are less quick to believe that a photograph tells us the truth," he notes in the introduction to the catalogue...

...Speculators, if they ever gave the matter a thought, surely could not have imagined that in the 1970s the same buildings would be sheltering immigrants just as poor, let alone the native not-so-poor...

...We are accustomed to thinking of the documentary mode as an esthetic system, and we are aware of the fact that a photographer's esthetic prejudices conscious or unconscious shape the nature of the picture's true content...

...They are, of course, the same tenements that are now leaking and crumbling on the heads of tenants in the South Bronx and the Lower East Side...

...The derbies and black suits of the men in these pictures do not disguise the often ungainly build that comes from heavy labor...

...One likes to think their descendants are not so beleaguered, yet scarcely less affecting than the picture itself is the thought that they might be attending Weight Watchers and paying the other tolls exacted by prosperity...

...This is partly because psychological discoveries have convinced us our Victorian forebears were smarmy hypocrites...

...It is interesting, however, for its examples of the period's mania for measuring and examining different races "scientifically...

...The sun shining through a sloping skylight to the side throws a rhomboid of light on the wall in precisely the right place...

...Johnston undoubtedly took the sweat out of labor, but her noncommittal style left the laborers' dignity intact...

...According to Sir Kenneth Clark, kindness as an abstraction was a bourgeois conception that arose early in the Romantic era...