MUSEUM REVIEW

HEAD WITH HORNS:
SELF – PORTRAIT OF A HUMAN IMP

by Menachem Wecker

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198
General Information: 212-535-7710
Admission: $12.00 suggested for adults, $7.00 suggested for students and senior citizens

Gauguin in New York Collections:
The Lure of the Exotic
June 18, 2002–October 20, 2002
The Robert Lehman Wing

Richard Avedon: Portraits
September 26, 2002–January 5, 2003
Special Exhibition Galleries, The Tisch Galleries, 2nd floor

In a fashion very much akin to the Greek Philosopher in Rembrandt van Rijn’s Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer, I stood in a rotunda of the Metropolitan Museum of Art gawking at Paul Gauguin’s Head With Horns (ca. 1895-7). This sculpture was the culmination of my two hour stay at the museum, serving as a wonderful symbol to epitomize and synthesize the two exhibits I saw: Richard Avedon: Portraits and Gauguin in New York Collections: The Lure of the Exotic.

Amateur art critics generally grasp Gauguin’s art, so only a short exposé is necessary. The painter, corroborating van Gogh’s prophecy that “The future belongs to painters who depict the tropics,” moved somewhat recklessly to a stilt-supported Tahitian house, abandoning his business and family for an untamed, Thoreauvian jungle. This fixation on “completely uncivilized surroundings and total solitude” yielded the same revolutionary results it did for Rousseau and Jarry, amongst others. Head With Horns severely portrays a self-portrait of the artist as a devil, a motif Gauguin enjoyed for its childish naiveté.

This image exemplifies Richard Avedon’s lesser-known (but no less brilliant) work. Born of Russian Jewish parents in 1923, the native New Yorker had poetic ambitions, a field in which he successfully achieved distinction at age 18. Luckily, he dropped poetry for photography. “I have worked out a series of no’s,” Avedon said of his art, “No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to seduction of poses or narrative. And all these no’s force me to the yes. I have a white background, I have the person I am interested in and the thing happens between us.” And happen it does! Armed with his Maimonidean, Ahad-Haamesque principles of negativity, Avedon reduces his portraits to a bare minimum, discarding color and rococo settings by the waist-side.

My friend Michael does justice to Avedon’s portraits by describing them as “on a mission – very determined.” This laconic yet profound interpretation, in my opinion, unveils the portraits’ true genius. Avedon’s early portraiture depicts a certain potential energy, a desire to jump clear out of the frame and land at the viewer’s feet (one model features a man attempting to catapult himself with his crutches). The prototypes seem to despise the medium that is portraying them, mocking it either by boring a hole visually through the observer or looking off into the distance. Caught unaware and devoid of self-consciousness, the sitters resemble Lucian Freud’s work in terms of scale, tone, animation and detail; however, they are wholly original in their resentment of their capture in an amorphous, timeless photograph.

Avedon’s photograph of Marilyn Monroe (1957) is bizarre in a delightful way; it alone, to the best of my knowledge, shows the star nervous and dreadfully unglamorous. My friend Avigail explained the marvel as looking “like you caught them right now, not staged.” Such spontaneity is easily mistaken for sadness. The background’s very sculptural, white forms exert tremendous pressure on the models’ shoulders, dragging them begrudgingly to the floor. And yet the subjects stare out from that very formless anonymity with eyes of fire, not of sorrow. Jerome Smith & Isaac Reynolds: Civil Rights Workers (1963) parade their Freedom Now buttons with an aura of heroic desperation, while William Casby: Born a Slave (1963), perhaps Avedon’s best picture, demands attention by virtue of its grotesque aggressiveness; like a slain monster mounted on a castle wall, it is hard to ignore. All of Avedon’s characters step forward individually, say their piece, and then resume their phantom-like existence as part of the environment.

Halfway through the exhibit, a series of Igor Stravinsky (1969) serves as prophetic writing on the wall, predicting a gross diminution of and departure from the artist’s early work. The first contains a white background dominating the composer with downcast eyes. Showing Stravinsky looking weakly beyond the viewer, the second is frightfully dull, followed by a completely staged and uninventive musician looking right at the viewer. Avedon’s desertion of all the aesthetic brilliance overflowing in his earlier works is very surprising and disappointing. He has surrendered his talent to the National Geographic mentality of staged, sentimental postcards. Samuel Beckett: Writer (1979), a double portrait, looks at the ground in the rightmost picture almost embarrassed at his inability to sustain his confident air from the first picture. The dynamic, miraculous union of photographer and photographee has come to an awkward stalemate.

True genius is manifest by pulling itself out of the gutter and cleaning itself off. The Chicago Seven: Anti-war Activists (1969), Jacob Israel Avedon [the artist’s father] (1969-73), and the homeless drifters (1980’s) are so pathetically graphic and stylized that we see a certain smugness to them. Mocking their caricaturized nature, the photos are the Darwinian fittest – no longer the product of the young, searching artist. Having found the answers, they instruct rather than ask.

Avedon’s final series of self-portraits (2002) depicts the artist, aged 78, in a series of three frames. The viewer is carried through a similar evolution as the Stravinsky portraits; however, in the third picture, a very clearly defined, mature Avedon almost begs his viewer to review and reevaluate the two portraits to his left. He demands they be considered as an unmitigated whole rather than a series of trial and error.

The tie that binds these two artists, Gauguin and Avedon, is the desire to dethrone the legendary Goddess of the temple Saïs, flaunting the fact that “no one has lifted my veil.”

Nature hides itself from all but those who know how to look. Only when one works out a series of no’s as well as a philosophy of non-conformity and moves to Tahiti, either literally or figuratively, does one develop the kaleidoscope through which one sees the world through the mature eyes of a baby. As Picasso said, “Once I painted like Rembrandt, but it has taken me a lifetime to draw like children.”

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