The Man Who Brought Poetry To the Curb

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The New York Sun

POET OF THE CURBSTONE At the Museum of the City of New York, essayist and critic Philip Lopate, author of “Rudy Burckhardt” (Harry N.Abrams), led a panel on Friday entitled “Revisiting the Work of Rudy Burckhardt.”


Burckhardt (1914-99), born in Basel, Switzerland, came to New York at age 21 and began his career as a photographer, filmmaker, and painter. Although his photographs of creative types such as Merce Cunningham, John Ashbery, John Cage, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning, were admired by cognoscenti, Burckhardt’s other varied work is finding a larger audience.


One of the first slides shown that evening was Burckhardt’s photo of his close friend Edwin Denby seated atop a building on West 21st Street. Burckhardt’s “double perspective,” Mr. Lopate said, added humor and complexity to the image: Far below Denby, a truck seems as if it’s about to cause a traffic jam. Dance critic Denby looks as though he is performing a scene from a Buster Keaton movie.


Mr. Lopate said one of the charms of Burckhardt’s photos is their resemblance to film stills: “They don’t have that composed look,” he said.


While presenting other slides, Mr. Lopate described how Burckhardt initially focused on formal relationships between small-scale objects, such as light globes in the sidewalk, standpipes and manhole covers, and other architectural details. “He had a feeling for materials,” Mr. Lopate said. Burckhardt was a poet of the curbstone, he continued, whose talents included capturing where street and sidewalk meet.


One picture showed a sign advertising the original New York Sun “bursting out” of its lower-left corner. On the right side of the photo, a preoccupied, dandified businessman walks with determination. Mr. Lopate said that with Burckhardt, one got a sense of the pedestrian stream – of what Walter Benjamin once called “love at last sight,” where one glimpses someone briefly, never to see him or her again.


Mr. Lopate showed other examples outlining Burckhardt’s interest in the “casual choreography of the streets.” Some photos featured anonymous pedestrians – only trousers and skirt bottoms were visible. Others played with disparity of scale: The photographer shot tall buildings from the tops of other buildings.


Others on the panel included independent filmmaker Jacob Burckhardt, son of Rudy Burckhardt; painter Jane Freilicher, who was featured in Burckhardt’s film “Morning Tension”; poet and art critic Vincent Katz, a contributing essayist for the book “Rudy Burckhardt,” and a professor of modern art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, Robert Storr.


Mr. Storr read from an essay he wrote where he described Burckhardt as “an expert at being there.” Burckhardt, he said, with his gentle grip on the ephemeral, noted details such as the downcast glances of pedestrians, and managed to capture the immediacy of quotidian life.


Mr. Katz noted that, in Burckhardt’s crowd scenes, subjects don’t look at one other, yet avoid collisions.


Burckhardt had connected to so many different people but had not aggressively pursued a career, Mr. Katz said. Picking up on this theme, Jacob Burckhardt said his father’s films were not driven by commercialism. His father, who made 101 films between 1936 and 1999, favored movies with unprofessional actors, including some intriguing cameo appearances.


One film shown during the evening, “Mounting Tension,” featured painter Ms. Freilicher and an also young Mr. Ashbery, carrying a baseball bat around the Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Lopate commented that it was interesting to see the poet portrayed “as kind of a jock” and commented on how “arboreal” MoMA’s sculpture garden looked.


Ms. Freilicher recalled the making of the film. “We improvised. We found locations,” she said, which included Prospect Park. She spoke of Burckhardt’s “complete unpretentiousness” as a collaborator and friend and fondly recalled his very unassuming, wry sense of humor.


Burckhardt managed to imbue his urban themes with a pastoral air, a slow-motion country feeling in seeing the city pass you by, Ms. Freilicher said.


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ISLAND LIFE The president of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society, Judith Berdy, presided over the society’s annual meeting last week. Her report included mention of the reactivation of the Society of Architectural Historians chapter in New York City. Songs from “Patient Island,” with Nina Katchadourian, Doug Skinner, and Brian Dewan, followed the meeting. Mr. Skinner, who plays the ukulele, is also a writer of topics he described as “unpopular culture.” One of his articles, on the Count of St. Germain, an 18th-century man of mystery, appeared in the magazine Fortean Times. Mr. Dewan’s hobbies, incidentally, include collecting old audio-visual equipment.


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KNICK-KNACKS The chair of the board of trustees at the New-York Historical Society, Nancy Newcomb, yesterday announced the appointment to its board of a Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Bernard L. Schwartz, who is chairman of the board and chief executive of Loral Space & Communications, headquartered in New York City.


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