Along the Tracks

Caryn Stein

In Homage To...

Rudy Burckhardt

Burckhardt's arresting and intimate portraits of artists derive mostly from his work for Art News during the 1950s and early '60s. Under the rubric an artist "Paints a Picture," the magazine published a series of articles on emerging artists featuring a different profile nearly every month. Assigned to photograph many of these articles, Burckhardt followed each artist through a day in the studio, documenting the progression of an individual work of art. His pictures convey exceptional informality and spontaneity, qualities that are often missing from the more studied poses that some of the same artists would adopt for the photojournalists of mainstream publications such as Life and Time.

Source: New York University

The paradox is that he began as an outsider. Born in Basel to a distinguished Swiss family that included the Renaissance art historian Jakob Burckhardt, the young aspirant left his home city as soon as an inheritance allowed him to; he settled definitively in New York in 1935. His friend, the dance critic and poet Edwin Denby introduced him to the New York art scene, which, along with the city itself, eventually became his primary subject matter.

The Grey Art Gallery exhibition included Burckhardt's photographs and 16mm films, placed alongside paintings and sculptures by artists he knew and photographed. Burckhardt was the house photographer for Art News in the `50s and early `60s and produced intimate portraits for photo-essays on de Kooning, Rothko, Porter and Joan Mitchell. At the Grey, exhibition vitrines displayed several of these feature articles, which the curators in a few instances triangulated with the original photographs and paintings. The resulting time warp eerily juxtaposed that day's perception of the artists as innovative newcomers and our current view of them as acknowledged classics from an earlier period.

Source: Art In America