A first glance on opening day
A first glance on opening day
Without meaning to, I dropped in on the HCB 'Modern Century' show on Saturday, the opening day. We were in the neighborhood about ½ hour after opening time and drove by just to see how long the line was – and found there wasn’t any!
E v e r y t h i n g is there, his life’s work, including vintage prints he made himself before 1935 (when he stopped doing his own printing). It’s organized around NY MOMA curator Peter Galassi’s thesis that those who value only HCB’s early ‘surrealist’ work are missing half of what he achieved. Galassi rejects the art-versus-photojournalism dichotomy/hierarchy and treats the later work as a superb achievement in its own important artform. His point is that if you view the arts democratically, then the picture magazines were one of the great popular-art accomplishments of mid-cantury. Magnum was the focal point and HCB was its epitome.
The show is overwhelming, and will take me several visits to assimilate. Fortunately you can take it home with you: the catalog is beautifully reproduced and, I believe, inclusive. It’s $47.50 from Amazon in hardback, and the SFMOMA bookstore also had paperback copies.
On a first quick run through the show, what stood out were the images that hadn't to my knowledge been published before, such as the one on the cover of the catalog. You gotta see 'em!
The other facet that excited me was the prints themeselves. The images were all familiar (I’d spent a lot of time with the catalog beforehand), so it was the direct experience of the prints that excited me as much as the new images. Other than the vintage prints, the majority are by Picto, from the 60s and 70s. I’d heard the prints were ‘too flat’ compared to earlier collections/exhibitions. But no, they’re not ‘flat,’ in the sense of lacking overall contrast. Instead, they have suppressed highlights. Partly this may be an accommodation for HCB’s incconsistent approach to exposure; but it’s also a lesson about what one might expect in a ‘good’ print. Picto must have had an apprentice printer with no job besides flashing whole boxes of paper, so as to produce the toned-down highlights you'd now get through split-filter printing. No highlight ever rises above Zone VII; no white paper shows in the whole exhibit, even in the extreme case, the portrait of Ezra Pound. As a result you can always see highlight detail. In the Pound portrait there’s a bit of blown highlight in his lap (also in St-Tropez 1959); but the printer managed to reveal detail even in the poet’s frizzy white hair. That detail was missing in the prints I’d seen before. And even Matisse’s pigeons aren’t paper-white (though you can’t see feathery detail).
(In the picture of folks in line, I tried to imitate this style of highlight supression – though the image and processing are miles short of the real thing.)
I’m still hoping to attend the November 14 meet-up, if I can cancel another commitment.
Kirk