Rudy Burckhardt in town & country: as a recent exhibition and documentary film suggest, this deceptively nonchalant painter-photographer-filmmaker was equally inspired by New York City and rural Maine

Art in America, April, 2004 by Stephen Westfall

Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) was an essential formulator of the attitudes and esthetics of the New York School, that amorphous field of painters, poets, composers and choreographers who were and are united by something more than simple proximity to New York City. The hinder is partly a fascination with the patterns and structures of everyday life and the speed with which they hurtle by, the vernacular and velocity of the city. There is also the charmed, seasonal, dialogic movement between town and country, and also a lighthearted pragmatism in the manufacture of the work, an off-the-cuff air that disguises a ferocious esthetic sensitivity. Burckhardt put all these aspects into play as early--and across as wide a range of mediums--as practically any other visual artist. Partly by his own sympathies and partly through his long friendship with dance critic and poet Edwin Denby, he was deeply connected with the New York poets, who would appear in Burckhardt's filmed skits and improvisations. Though not the best-known artist in any medium, even photography or film, where his natural gifts clearly resided, he was nevertheless near the core of, seemingly, just about everything. Perhaps the most important photographic chronicler, after Hans Namuth, of the New York School painters, he was also the cameraman for many of Joseph Cornell's films.

Last May and June, New York viewers could sample the broad spectrum of artwork produced by the Swiss-born Burekhardt between his arrival in New York in the mid-1930s and his death in 1999. In Midtown, Tibor de Nagy Gallery mounted a survey, curated by poet-critic Vincent Katz, of Burckhardt's seminal black-and-white photographs of New York, while down on Eighth Street, the New York Studio School presented a selection, also curated by Katz, of Burckhardt's photographs and paintings of Maine, where he regularly summered. The Studio School also ran nights devoted to his hilarious and tender experimental films and presented A Man in the Woods, a documentary by Katz on Burckhardt's work that included interviews with the artist and his wife, the painter Yvonne Jaquette, and featured such notable talking heads as Robert Storr and Brian Wallis.

The photographs at Tibor de Nagy, mostly from the '30s and '40s, are canonical depictions of the interactions between human beings and architecture. Burckhardt declined the camera's voyeuristic and documentarian potential in favor of a bemused, structuralist casting of pedestrians and subway passengers into larger dramas of space and movement that were just beyond the scope of his subjects' awareness. If a figure stands outside a storefront, it is a syncopated pause in an implied movement that carries beyond the frame. Burckhardt's photos have a jazz musician's sense of a city's rhythm, tempo and harmonic structure. This is just as evident in his treatment of buildings, their undulating skylines and shifting grids of masonry and glass, as it is in his images of the people framed by them.

As a street photographer, Burckhardt had no desire to pry and wasn't interested in personal or social melodrama, which was the dominant mode of expression in American photography when he started taking pictures in New York. The closest he comes is a subway photograph in which one of the riders realizes he's in the shot just as the picture is taken. "Hey!" he's yelping, but no psychology is being disclosed, it's another brusquely passing moment, a shout captured by a suddenly abashed photographer who already had a foot out the door at that stop.

A New York Times critic recently termed Burckhardt's paintings "less salubrious" than his city photographs, an observation that misses the comedy and strength of his canvases, and the doggedness of his touch. The paintings also display a sure abstract sense of composition and tonal color that owes a lot to Burckhardt's framing eye. His cropping of a Maine forest into a grid of vertical pine trunk columns and horizontal branches creates a kind of natural cityscape. His deliberate construction in paint of the geometry and dull reds and greens of spiraling ferns against the forest floor and vertical pine bark patterns is instantly recognizable as a fine style.

The Maine photographs aren't as insouciantly riveting as his New York images. Burckhardt does, however, cultivate what can be described as anecdotal structure and a recognizable intimacy from walks in the woods: the pine trunks and undulating bark patterns that reappear in his paintings, a white moth sleeping on a dark leaf.

Katz's documentary film closes with a very funny skit of Burckhardt scrawling a horrible brushstroke across a blank canvas set up out in the woods. He throws his brush down in disgust and yells, "I can't paint!" and proceeds to knock painting and easel over, then crawl around like a deranged caveman behind a couple of large trees, bending and yanking at saplings, then crawling back in front of the camera to cry determinedly, "But I'll paint anyhow!" Though given to bouts of rueful depression himself, he could only burlesque the spectacle of an artist's self-congratulatory struggles. He didn't act as if the world owed him anything. His comic sense was his restraining discipline, which both belied and focused his love of structure, movement, texture, the human form and the alertness of consciousness to itself in these recognitions. Balanchine comes to mind, as do the modern, New York-based dance-makers that Burckhardt loved. He was a worldly choreographer working outside of dance, in film and paint, and an unannounced Zen master of the art of being a New Yorker.