Impressions of Impressionists

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The New York Sun

It’s hard to know what to make of Neil Folberg’s show “Manet, Morisot & Friends” at the Flomenhaft Gallery. Many of the pictures — most, actually — are quite beautiful, but beautiful in a full-hearted way contemporary art has taught us to be wary of. In addition, the pictures are nothing at all like Mr. Folberg’s best-known earlier work, and it is a bit unnerving to experience a photographer who can reorient himself to such an extent. Finally, they are so forthrightly derived from the work of others that they call into question the legitimate bounds of influence.

Mr. Folberg was commissioned in 2002 by Lin Arison, a writer with whom he collaborates, to create a body of photographs “about the lives and world of the French Impressionist painters.” There has been lively intercourse between painters and photographers since photography came into being, but I am not aware of another project as extensive and thorough as Mr. Folberg’s. He immersed himself in the culture and history of late 19thcentury France and the lives and works of the Impressionists: Pissarro, Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Morisot, Renoir, Degas, van Gogh. Not just their paintings and drawings and writings, but the actual landscapes they painted, the living rooms and ateliers where they lived and worked, and their flesh-and-blood descendants. To a remarkable degree he became one with them, if not actually one of them, and the photographs he took are in effect an extension of the Impressionist oeuvre.


Consider “Degas, ‘Four Dancers,'” a 44-inch-by-60-inch Ultrachrome print. There are many well-known photographs of ballerinas practicing — Cornell Capa’s “The Bolshoi Ballet School,” for instance — and none of them can help but recall Degas’s many paintings of women in tights and tutus practicing and performing. Mr. Folberg’s four young dancers, though, are consciously meant to bring the painter to mind. One thing he certainly has in common with his inspiration is that the picture is lovely.

The four girls are multiplied to eight by their reflections in the mirror; there seem to be six along the wall and two stretching. The mirror is a regular device in representations of the ballet rehearsal room, and here it lets us see two of the girls in double profile. The girls are obviously posed, but ballerinas are always posed, and each seems comfortable in her position. They wear white tutus with sleeveless bodices and long tulle skirts. Two of the girls have pink ribbons tied in a bow around their waist, with a matching ribbon around their neck, and the other two girls have blue ribbons. Soft light comes from a window above and models their delicate skin and the shapes of their heads, which are defined by hair pulled back tightly into buns. The faces we see are confident, curious, immensely charming; not just pretty, but with personalities, even character.


This is a very pleasing photograph to look at. The eye keeps traveling along the line of girls at the wall, down to the two images of the girl in the foreground, and up to and along the wall again. I have described it at length because it seems Mr. Folberg must have spent a fair amount of time thinking about and executing it. It didn’t just happen, but he makes it seem that it might have. What puzzles me is trying to figure the right criterion for judging it: Is the measure how close it comes to the master, or simply the viewer’s response to it as an independent object? I am not competent to make the former judgment, but I am ready to vote in favor of the picture’s pleasure.

There are several other pictures that elicit comparable reactions, the most conspicuous being the first one you see upon entering the gallery: “Renoir, ‘The Luncheon of the Boating Party,'” another 44-inch-by-60-inch Ultrachrome print. It seems almost comic that anyone would restage such an elaborate image, but after the initial experience of recognition, the many felicities of the realized picture draw our attention: the woman on the left holding the dog, the woman seated in the middle with her head craned upward, the expression on the little boy to the right of her, the sparkle of the sun off of the carafe on the table.The same exercise of recognition, inspection, and satisfaction occurs when viewing “Cézanne, ‘Rocher Rouge, Bibemus,'” “Monet, “Japanese Bridge, Giverny,'” or “Pissarro, ‘Village Landscape,'” all Ultrachrome prints.


The portraits of women also deserve special mention. “Morisot, ‘Young Woman in Blue,'” “Monet, ‘La Japonaise,'” “Manet, ‘Lucie Rouart,'” “Manet, ‘Au Repos,'” and “Van Gogh, ‘L’Arlésienne'” are not just pictures of attractive women, they portray women as intelligent, autonomous, emotionally mature human beings with enormous sensuality but without sexual snickering. These portraits are as far distant from Thomas Struth’s blankeyed elephantine heads as from the synthetically alluring creatures in fashion photographs. If Mr. Folberg had to time-travel back to 19th-century France to learn how it’s done — the coloring, the lighting, the relaxed postures — he has returned with wonderful souvenirs from his trip.

Mr. Folberg first drew wide attention with “And I Shall Dwell Among Them,” a book of historic synagogues of the world. These pictures were so infused with kavanah (Hebrew: attunement, heartfelt mental and spiritual concentration) that the presence of their congregations was palpable even in sanctuaries that had not had a minyan for centuries. The landscapes of “In a Desert Land: Photographs of Israel, Egypt, and Jordan,” showed what an apt student Mr. Folberg had been when he studied with Ansel Adams. His third book, “Celestial Nights: Visions of an Ancient Land,” contained mystical black-and-white photographs of ruins at archaeological sites in the Near East crowned with dazzling arrays of stars.


“Manet, Morisot & Friends” is another turning point for Neil Folberg: It brings us up sharp with its evocation of another time and another place, and its profound questions about originality, tradition, and the estimation of beauty.


Until November 30 (547 W. 27th Street, Suite 10011, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-268-4952).


The New York Sun

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