The Grand, Gothic Gaiety of a True American Original
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Meatyard is an unusual name. A genealogical Web site I consulted said that Meatyard, as a surname, comes from a medieval word for a measuring stick. So the King James Bible renders Leviticus 19:35, “Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meteyard, in weight, or in measure.” Interesting enough, but when I mentioned to my daughter that I was writing an article about a man named Ralph Eugene Meatyard, she laughed. It is hard to believe his last name was not a cause for attention from the other boys at recess when he was in school, like Johnny Cash’s “Boy Named Sue.”
We identify a person by his name, by the way he looks – especially his face – and by his place. Meatyard, whose works are the subject of a major new exhibition at the International Center of Photography, played with all of these markers. He came to photography quite casually, buying a camera to take snapshots when his first child was born, but once he got started he was possessed.
From his modest home in the middle of a modest block in Lexington, Ky., he made excursions by car every weekend to take pictures, and he devoted his annual two weeks of summer vacation to printing the best of the thousands of pictures he had taken. With jazz blaring in the makeshift darkroom he set up in his bedroom, he made the 7-by-7-inch black-and-white prints seen here. Meatyard died in 1972 at 47, after living with cancer for several years, but he left an exquisite body of work from his two decades of shooting, a body of work as unique and peculiar as his name.
In a picture by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, there is almost always something off. The range of offness is wide. An untitled picture from 1960 is not too far off: the black-and-white image is of two boys in front of a house. The house is apparently abandoned – the white paint is peeling, the steps are gone from the porch, the grass in the yard is uncared for. A boy of about 6, wearing short pants, a T-shirt, white socks, and sneakers stands beside the door with both hands over his mouth, as if to keep himself from blurting out something he thinks should not be said. An older boy, maybe 10, stands in the unkempt grass, midway between the house and the camera, wearing jeans, a white T-shirt, and glasses. His body language is not what you get in a casual family snapshot; his left leg, his hands, and especially the suggestive tilt of his head are somehow too knowing. But what is it these otherwise unexceptional looking white middle-class kids know? No idea.
An untitled picture from 1963 is much further off. A young boy is sitting beside a sun-dappled stream. It is impossible to tell how old he is, because he is wearing a white rubber mask in the form of an adult man’s face. But he may be the younger boy from the previous picture, three years on. The boy is waving his arms so rapidly that, combined with a slow shutter speed, they almost disappear. In the right foreground, rushing water falls prettily down some rocks. But there are two unclothed plastic dolls in the water; one lies in the foreground with it arms at its side. To the left the other, a slightly smaller figure, is on its knees with its arms out; the articulation of the doll’s hip joints is not meant for this posture so the legs seem to be cruelly bent the wrong way. What is this picture about? No idea.
Or rather, too many ideas. What exactly the pictures are about is not clear, but like the best of surreal art they unleash a flow of psychological and narrative possibilities. Unlike the postmodern artists with whom he is frequently linked, there is nothing programmatic or doctrinaire about Meatyard’s work; it does not smack of the academic. He is one of those rigorously original and singular Americans like Edgar Allen Poe, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Charles Ives, and Joseph Cornell – and, very much like them, caught up in the romance of the strange.
This ample exhibition, organized by ICP Assistant Curator Cynthia Young, covers Meatyard’s entire career, so we can follow the arc of its development. Beginning simply but confidently, with a project on Lexington’s Georgetown Street, a black neighborhood, he shot series whose titles suggest their content: “Cemetery Sculpture,” “No-Focus,” “Abstractions,” “Light on Water,” “Zen Twigs,” and self-portraits. But it was in the 1960s, with the pictures posed in abandoned sites in the Kentucky countryside – most suffused with a whiff of the gothic – that he perfected his idiosyncratic style. Its apotheosis was the 64 images he produced after he was diagnosed with cancer, “The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater.”
The figures are Meatyard himself, his wife and children, and his friends, but they all wear masks, and all are named Lucybelle Crater. The main Lucybelle mask has a grotesque nose, big ears, pendulous lips, and a topknot. The various Lucybelles are posed in backyards and other domestic settings as real family snapshots are, but they take on a mythic quality, time-bound as all photographs are but timeless because they are primitively archetypal. In the last, most touching image, Meatyard, his athletic frame diminished by disease, wears a skirt and the Lucybelle mask. He leans affectionately toward his wife, who wears men’s clothes and a male mask. At the end of this life what his name was, what sex he was, mattered less than who he loved.
I will concede to the Freudian and Jungian interpreters of Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s work their darkest presentments, if they will acknowledge for me that it is fun to dress up and pretend, that the spooky is grandly entertaining, and that even this last, poignant photograph shows a man of the verge of gaiety, a gaiety, as W.B. Yeats wrote, “transfiguring all that dread.”
Until February 27 (1133 Sixth Avenue at 43rd Street, 212-857-0001).