Ugo Mulas: The New York Portraits - Leo Castelli Gallery, New York

Art in America, Feb, 2001 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

During the 1960s, Italian photographer Ugo Mulas shot the reigning lions and rising stars of New York's art world. He set out the range of that experience in large contact sheets and, in the process, opened a door to the more conceptual preoccupations of his final works.

Lured from his legal studies by the art talk at Milan's Bar Giamaica, and armed with a borrowed camera and a few words of advice about f-stops, Ugo Mulas became a photographer. His first assignment was to cover the 1954 Venice Biennale with photojournalist and friend Mario Dondero. Mulas documented every subsequent Biennale through 1972; he died of cancer less than a year later at age 44.

During the brief arc of his career, Mulas mastered every professional option offered by the medium at that time: photojournalism, portraiture, street photography, advertising, fashion, book illustration and, as his illness progressed, studio-bound experiments. Yet the works for which he is best known (or "unknown," since the photographer's name is often dissociated from the now-canonical images) are his pictures of artists. And although these embrace a range of subjects--David Smith in Italy forging the "Voltri" series for the 1962 Spoleto Festival, Alexander Calder clowning outside his studio in Sache, Lucio Fontana poised to slash a canvas--the most extensive and penetrating body of images is the cumulative record Mulas made of the New York art world during visits to the city in 1964, '65 and '67.

The catalyst for the first trip was an encounter at the Biennale with Leo Castelli and Alan Solomon, the director of the Jewish Museum, who had organized the United States's representation in Venice. Nineteen sixty-four was the watershed year Robert Rauschenberg became the first American to win the international prize for painting; the attraction of the U.S. was irresistible. In New York, Solomon served as Virgil for the photographer, who spoke little English, and he later wrote the introduction to the extraordinary book that resulted, New York: The New Art Scene (1967).

Inevitably an air of nostalgia has settled on these pictures of New York's artists, writers, collectors and dealers. But the photographs always were, and remain, unsentimental, well-informed, canny. Rauschenberg's unmade bed--his combine Bed of 1955 was in Castelli's collection--knowingly looms in the foreground of one studio shot. The photograph of Robert and Ethel Scull's dining room, with a fragment of James Rosenquist's Silver Skies (1962) just glimpsed across a table strewn with roses and laden with Renaissance bronzes, essays a still-life perspective on the acquisitive temperament well before Louise Lawler ventured into that territory.

Last fall the Castelli Gallery exhibited two dozen vintage photographs by Mulas of Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman and Roy Lichtenstein which were taken during the New York visits. Most were straightforward enlargements, though a few were matted in pairs. One photo crisply summarizes the adjustments and abstractions intrinsic to Lichtenstein's transpositions from comic-strip graphics to paint. It presents a cropped view of the woman's head in The Sound of Music (1964), rendered with Lichtenstein's trademark dots and a fiercely angular stripe for shading, beside a wall taped with source clippings and drawings used for that canvas and others. There is Johns in 1964, finishing a "Map" while holding an open atlas behind his back like a schoolchild being quizzed in geography. Three years later, in a moodily lit studio, he is painting Harlem Light, or rather his animated shadow seems to do the work.

The exhibition's greatest fascination was generated by seven contact sheets, all printed on paper as generously sized as the individual enlargements. Some of the contacts function in a fairly direct narrative fashion. Fifteen shots of Newman, arms outstretched before an apparently blank canvas, bring to mind an avuncular conductor leading the Boston Pops. In a fittingly comic-strip-like fashion, Lichtenstein and one of his painted ceramic mannequin heads enact an oblique romantic scenario before a backdrop that includes a painted sunrise and thought and speech bubbles.

More striking, however, are the big contact sheets which combine several rolls of film in syncopated compositions. These register scores of negatives in regular strips surrounded and occasionally interrupted by the blackest black of exposed photosensitive paper. Changes of scene and clothing mark breaks in time, as the repetitions of the negative numbers, and even a change in film brand, remind us that the photographer paused to reload. The out-of-frame circumstances of one shot are disclosed by the information supplied in a nearby frame. For example, one negative in a sequence reveals the watchful presence of Annalee Newman, who is just out of view in the images that center on her famous husband. You can hunt down the negatives which served for the enlargements on display--one is even targeted with a red circle--and see where Mulas finished off a roll with two shots of an earlier photo, hanging on the wall, that shows the youthful Castelli in a fedora.