Andy Grundberg
8 articles
Photography View; THE SPOTLIGHT IS ON EUGENE ATGET
By Andy Grundberg
The photographer at the center of this fall season is Eugene Atget, turn-of-the-century recorder of Paris and environs. The Museum of Modern Art, which has had some 5,000 of his prints and negatives in its possession since 1968, is finally ready to present Atget's work in what promises to be a comprehensive and impeccably scholarly account of the photographer's career. This fall's installment, ''Old France'' (Oct. 3-Jan. 3), is the first of four major annual exhibitions collectively titled ''The Work of Atget.'' Each show is to be accompanied by a book authored by John Szarkowski, the museum's director of photography and a long-time Atget afficianado. Meanwhile Marcuse Pfeifer and Zabriskie galleries, not to let the anticipated wave of enthusiasm pass unembellished, have scheduled Atget exhibitions of their own (Oct. 17-Nov. 27 at Pfeifer, Oct. 21-Nov. 21 at Zabriskie).
New York Times • Arts • page 29 • 1,220 words
PHOTOGRAPHY
By Andy Grundberg
THE WORK OF ATGET Volume One. Old France. By John Szarkowski and Maria Morris Hambourg. Illustrated. 177 pp. New York: The Museum of Modern Art/Distributed by New York Graphic Society. $40. When Eugene Atget died in Paris in 1927, he was a little-known photographer. Today, thanks largely to the foresight of photographer Berenice Abbott, who rescued and preserved some 5,000 of his prints and negatives, Atget is considered by many to be the most important photographer of the 20th century, if not in the history of photography. This remarkable rise to prominence, based on a style that is at once documentary and expressive, is even more remarkable considering that Atget's work has heretofore been published and presented in a manner best described as scattered and inchoate. ''The Work of Atget: Old France'' represents the first attempt to bring some sense of order to Atget's career, which spanned more than 30 years. It is the first of four Atget volumes scheduled to be published annually by the Museum of Modern Art, which since 1968 has owned the Atget material salvaged by Miss Abbott. After 13 years of study, the museum's department of photography, directed by John Szarkowski, has unlocked some of the mystery that has surrounded Atget's achievement. Relying on the research of Maria Morris Hambourg and other scholars before her, the museum can now date Atget's negatives with reasonable certainty.
New York Times • Arts; Books • page 11 • 3,937 words
PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS
By Andy Grundberg
HUNGARIAN MEMORIES By Andre Kertesz. Introduction by Hilton Kramer. Illustrated. 194 pp. Boston: New York Graphic Society/Little, Brown & Co. $55. In 1912, the same year that he went to work at the Budapest Stock Exchange, 18-year-old Andre Kertesz acquired his first camera. Today, 70 years later, Mr. Kertesz is still photographing, and he is widely acknowledged as one of this century's most prolific, influential and lyric artists of the camera. ''Hungarian Memories'' contains more than 150 images made between 1912 and 1925, when the photographer left Budapest for Paris. It was in Paris that Mr. Kertesz's seemingly effortless style reached the height of its powers - where, for example, such masterpieces as ''Satiric Dancer'' and ''Chez Mondrian'' were taken - but even in his earliest Hungarian pictures, Mr. Kertesz's eye was remarkably assured. Examples abound, many of them classics: a couple wrapped in rapturous embrace (''Lovers,'' 1915); an underwater swimmer rendered headless by the refraction of water (''Esztergom,'' 1917); a blind fiddler being led down the street by a barefoot boy (''Abony,'' 1921). Other images, equally engaging, are reproduced here for the first time.
New York Times • Arts; Books • page 11 • 2,964 words
A RESPECT FOR TRADITION
By Andy Grundberg
Contemporary photography of a no-frills sort is down but not out. It lives on despite the demise of many of the galleries that showcased and supported it, despite a shift toward a photographic practice addressed to the larger art world of painting and sculpture, and despite a stagnant marketplace. Fortunately, the artists who are today's torchbearers of what was once called ''straight photography'' are not as depressed as the economy. The proof, in this case, is in the pictures, and the pictures are in a show called ''New Work by Eight Photographers,'' at Daniel Wolf Gallery (30 West 57th Street, through April 2). The show's 38 photographs, all taken in the last three years, have an underlying unity despite the diversity of temperaments and concerns they represent. Most obviously, they are relatively straightforward and unmanipulated depictions of things seen. They show us fragments of the world, not figments of the artistic imagination. This approach entails a great respect for the medium's descriptive capacities and its inherent expressiveness. It is conservative in the original sense of the word: it tends to cherish and preserve photography's traditional qualities and functions. Today, in photography at least, such conservatism is in many ways the most radical stance of all.
New York Times • Arts • page 29 • 1,173 words
EXHIBITIONS
PUBLISHED
10 March 1985
EUGENE ATGET-HIS ART BRIDGED TWO CENTURIES
By Andy Grundberg
Over the last four years the Museum of Modern Art's department of photography has organized a series of four major exhibitions involving a total of close to 500 photographs, supervised the publication of four exquisitely reproduced books and devoted uncounted hours to research and writing, all with one aim: to establish Eug ene Atget (1857-1927) as a great photographer. With the third and fourth exhibitions opening simultaneously at the museum this week and the fourth book coming off the presses, it now seems safe to say that the Modern has accomplished its mission. There is no longer any doubt, if indeed there ever was, that Atget is one of the great practitioners of the medium. But one question remains, even after the museum's gargantuan efforts: what exactly is it that makes Atget great?
New York Times • Arts • page 35 • 1,657 words
EXHIBITION
New Photography: Zeke Berman, Antonio Mendoza, Judith Joy Ross, and Michael Spano
PUBLISHED
15 September 1985
THE MODERN FOCUSES ON CONTEMPORARY VISIONS
By Andy Grundberg
What's new? The question, endemic to our fashionable culture, can never be put to rest. We have seen, in photography in the last 20 years, ''New Documents,'' ''New Topographics,'' ''New Pictorialism,'' ''New Landscapes,'' ''New Color'' - all categories invented to designate the presence of something novel and therefore, it is assumed, interesting. Now there is ''New Photography,'' an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of 45 photographs by four relatively little-known image makers. Given the show's title, and the authority of its curator, John Szarkowski, who directs the museum's Department of Photography, ''New Photography'' could be expected to satisfy our yearning for the new for at least the immediate future. The four photographers are Zeke Berman, Antonio Mendoza, Judith Joy Ross and Michael Spano. They range in age from the early 30's to early 40's, and they live and work in New York except for Miss Ross, who hails from Pennsylvania. None is exactly an unknown; they all have been making photographs for several years and have gained some recognition for their efforts, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. But in terms of their careers, it would be fair to say that they are just hitting their strides.
New York Times • Arts • page 29 • 1,330 words
TAKING A FRESH LOOK AT FOREIGN YET FAMILIAR LANDS
By Andy Grundberg
One of photography's most exalted and dependable functions over the last 150 years has been to supply reports on the look and life of far-off lands. From the Egyptian pyramids to California's Yosemite Valley, camera pictures have served as our first introduction to the splendid and the exotic. Lately, however, as the stockpile of travel pictures has mounted, the world has seemed to shrink, and with it our capacity to be amazed. Familiarity breeds contempt - or at least ocular calluses. It is no small achievement, then, when a photographer is able to convince us that the world remains as strange and foreign to us as it did to our 19th-century forebears. Rosalind Solomon manages this trick in her solo exhibition of some 30 black-and-white photographs at the Museum of Modern Art (through Sept. 30). Organized by Peter Galassi, an associate curator in the museum's department of photography, the show spans 10 years of Ms. Solomon's work (1975-85) and concentrates on pictures taken during her travels to the Indian subcontinent and to Central and South America. As the title, ''Rosalind Solomon: Ritual,'' suggests, the images record a variety of religious, cult and folk ceremonies, and they do so with an intimacy and candid quality that is impressive.
New York Times • Arts • page 29 • 1,464 words
Review/Photography; The Otherworldly Abstractions of Aaron Siskind
By Andy Grundberg
LEAD: Although it slipped into the Museum of Modern Art this summer with little fanfare, the exhibition ''Siskind From the Collection'' is a small gem that should not be missed by anyone who cares about photography's relation to modern art. Consisting of 31 black-and-white images dating from 1932 to 1988, the show pays tribute to the long career of Aaron
New York Times • Arts • page 10 • 1,027 words