Boris Mikhailov: Photographic Provocateur

 

[I’m not usually a fan of art photography, but when I read this article on the Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov, I was fascinated by his vision.  I’d never heard of Mikhailov before, so I filled out the post with a brief bio of the artist and a little blurb on the venue of his current exhibit.  (It’s in Paris, tant pis.)]

“A SUBVERSIVE LENS ON UKRAINE”
By Jason Farago 

[Jason Farago’s “A Subversive Lens on Ukraine” was published in the New York Times on 2 November 2022 (Section C [“Arts”]).  It was accompanied by several reproductions of Mikhailov’s photographs from the exhibit, Ukrainian Diary, which are also included in the online version of the article: The Life’s Work of Boris Mikhailov: Photography’s Great Trickster, and Ukraine’s Greatest Artist - The New York Times (nytimes.com).]

In Paris, a new exhibition features the life’s work of Boris Mikhailov, photography’s great trickster.

PARIS — A new nation needs heroes; but when the mayhem comes suddenly, you take whatever heroes you can get. In 1991, as the Soviet Union lurched to dissolution and Ukraine prepared to declare independence, the photographer Boris Mikhailov fabricated a new self-portrait, wearing a military uniform and looking straight-on like a Moscow official. [He looks a little like Sean Penn, I think.] But on his green jacket, traditional Ukrainian embroidery had been slapped on top of the Soviet insignia. The background was a sickly, Pop-pink sherbet. The airbrushing was so over-the-top, the eyes so blue, the lips so rouged, that he looked like a porcelain doll. Here was a “National Hero” for Ukraine’s year zero, but he was not convincing anyone of his valor.

A counterfeit hero: I can think of worse descriptions of Boris Mikhailov, Ukraine’s most influential artist, and the sparkiest and most unpredictable photographer to have emerged from Eastern Europe during the Communist era. In the 1960s and 1970s, working in Kharkiv outside official Soviet structures, he devised a new photographic manner that availed itself of cheapness and low finish to discreetly disparage the regime. Later, in independent Ukraine, he pictured the chaos of economic liberalization in visceral images that pushed the ethical complications of social documentary to the breaking point. His art is mordant. Untrustworthy. At times delirious. It is, also, some of the profoundest art made anywhere in Europe in the past 60 years.

“Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary,” which opened recently at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (M.E.P. [European House of Photography; 7 September 2022-15 January 2023]) in Paris, is the biggest show of his life and — to spell it out — arrives as Ukrainian culture receives attention for the worst possible reason. It includes no fewer than 800 photographs, covering almost all of the series he undertook before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. There are burlesque self-portraits, but also straight reportage from the 2013-14 Maidan Uprising in Kyiv. Conceptual mockery of “lousy” Soviet pictures, as well as aching collages of poetry and everyday snaps. Preparations for the show were well underway when Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, and the war has reformatted “Ukrainian Diary” into a show of improbable resistance: to Soviet repression and now to Russian historical revisionism, to the fraudulence of official Communist art and to the global market’s appetite for trauma porn.

[According to Wikipedia: “Euromaidan, or the Maidan Uprising, was a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, which began on 21 November 2013 with large protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv. The protests were sparked by the Ukrainian government's sudden decision not to sign the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement, instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. Ukraine’s parliament had overwhelmingly approved of finalizing the Agreement with the EU, while Russia had put pressure on Ukraine to reject it. 

[“The scope of the protests widened, with calls for the resignation of President Viktor Yanukovych and the Azarov Government. The protesters opposed what they saw as widespread government corruption, the influence of oligarchs, abuse of power, and violation of human rights in Ukraine. Transparency International named Yanukovych as the top example of corruption in the world. The violent dispersal of protesters on 30 November caused further anger. The Euromaidan led to the 2014 Revolution of Dignity (Maidan Revolution).”]

Separately, two other Paris institutions zoom in on two series Mikhailov shot in the first years of Ukrainian independence. The Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce has hung the twilit, blue-tinged panoramas of “At Dusk” (1993), whose wintry obscurity outlines the violent transition to a market economy. And Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve, in the Marais district [historic district of Paris in the 3rd and 4th arrondissements on the Rive Droite, or Right Bank, of the Seine], is displaying dozens of photographs from “Case History” (1997-98), Mikhailov’s most famous and most controversial series — in which the wretched, the drunk and the homeless of the new capitalist Ukraine take on the roles of martyred saints and holy fools.

This summer, after spending several weeks in Kyiv, I met Mikhailov and his wife, Vita, at their home in west Berlin. It was an anxious time for them: overloaded, disquieted, with overlapping pressures from work and home. Until the pandemic, the Mikhailovs had been regularly commuting between the German capital and Kharkiv, which lies just 25 miles from the Russian border. Now, Ukraine’s second city was being flattened; shells were landing daily, even as western Ukraine found an unsteady calm. The neighborhood of their Kharkiv apartment had recently been bombed; much of Boris’s archive is there, and they knew nothing of its fate.

“War kills our life,” Mikhailov told me in Russian, his native language — which Vita translated for me with varying degrees of fidelity. (A Times researcher translated Mikhailov’s quotes for this article.) “It kills the meaning of life, it kills the past, it kills the future. It kills everything. And now everything is different.”

He was leafing through a proof of the M.E.P.’s catalog, and asking himself if the invasion had nullified this summation of his life’s work. “There are times when something stays, and times when it doesn’t,” he sighed at one point, doubting whether his images from the Soviet era would mean anything to young people today. “Maybe they will find something new. If not” — and here he switched to English — “bye-bye!”

But to judge from the crowded galleries in Paris this week, Mikhailov’s art has indeed found a young audience, not least for the experimental images of the 1960s and ’70s that filleted Soviet ideology with a light touch and acrid wit. I mingled with dozens of lycée students who were engrossed in his double-exposure color images that superimpose nudes, religious imagery and other forbidden material onto pictures of abundant wheat fields or Khrushchev-era apartment blocks [Nikita Khrushchev, 1894-1971; First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (de facto head of state): 1953-64]. They pored over his “Black Archive,” shot clandestinely in Kharkiv between 1968 and 1979, in which young women smoke, grandmothers dance, and Mikhailov poses nude in a chintzy living room, flashing a wicked grin.

These unofficial pictures were printed on cheap paper; they incorporated blurs and backlighting and too much headroom; the nudes, especially, could have gotten him packed to Siberia. Mikhailov, along with other artists of what’s now known as the Kharkiv School of Photography, could exhibit only in private, usually in friends’ kitchens. (“They were free artists,” Vita said, “because they didn’t think, ‘We should sell for money.’”) And the lack of public opportunities, not to mention a market, inspired a self-sufficiency guarded long after the Soviet censors faded from view.

Mikhailov was born to a family of engineers in Kharkiv in 1938, between two atrocities. A few years before his birth was the Holomodor, Stalin’s orchestrated famine, which killed nearly 4 million Ukrainians as collective punishment for their belief in cultural and political autonomy [Joseph Stalin, 1878-1953; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1922-52]. By 1941, Mikhailov’s father (who was from the Donbas) had enlisted as a Red Army officer, while his mother (born in a shtetl [Jewish village or small town in Eastern Europe] near Kyiv) escaped west with young Boris just before the Nazis entered Kharkiv and slaughtered the city’s Jews. He remembers the sirens from those early days, he said; the current invasion is not his first.

Kharkiv, even more than Kyiv, had been the crucible of the Ukrainian avant-garde in the first years of the Soviet Union. It was the first capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the proving ground of wildly ambitious Constructivist architecture [Constructivism: early 20th-century Russian movement in art and architecture characterized by the creation of nonrepresentational geometric objects using industrial materials] and the hub of a generation of experimental poets and writers. But by the time of Mikhailov’s youth, socialist realism [state-approved Stalinist artistic or literary style in the USSR that depicts an idealized vision of the life and industriousness of the workers] had become the only permitted style, and imagery of the revolution had decayed into Stalinist kitsch.

Mikhailov’s series “Luriki” (1971-85) took found black-and-white photographs of anonymous soldiers and sailors, or of happy families who are all alike, and overpainted them with hand coloring — a common technique in the Soviet Union, where color printing was expensive. These were probably the first artworks in the Soviet Union to use found imagery to capture the Soviet zeitgeist and tweak the regime. Yet their garishness gave him an out with irony-blind censors, to whom he could always explain that he was just trying to make the sitters look prettier.

Frequently his conceptual subversion led him to turn the camera on himself, in performative photography like “Crimean Snobbism” (1982): In sepia-toned prints, we see Boris, Vita and their friends, posing like Italian movie stars at a Black Sea resort town near Yalta. The peninsula is now occupied by Russia, though I also felt another contemporary abrasion; even before perestroika the Mikhailovs and their friends were pouting and flexing like Instagram influencers, playacting as richer and freer than the dominant system allowed. Those desires would recur in his post-Soviet photography, notably the series “Tea, Coffee, Cappuccino” (2000-10), which bitterly skewered the free-market free-for-all of independent Kharkiv, its plastic furniture, its trashy clothes.

Now the war has sent Ukraine into an economic tailspin, and Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s electrical grid threaten millions with scarcity and worse. Mikhailov never shied from misfortune and crisis, especially in the first years of Ukrainian independence, when the country fell into a spiral of hyperinflation that peaked at 10,000 percent. A new underclass of homeless people appeared in Kharkiv’s city parks, without any state aid to help them.

Out of that misery came the unshrinking “Case History,” for which Mikhailov photographed Kharkiv’s most desperate people and printed them at billboard size. He frequently had them pose nude, laughing or crying in the snow. He posed them in positions that recall a Pietà or the Descent from the Cross. He showed their chapped, burned, infected skin, their tumorous bellies and misshaped genitals; economic history is written on the flesh. Boris and Vita paid these subjects, and often invited them into their home — the 400 or so pictures of “Case History” were not reportage. They were a requiem for all of the failed promises of both communism and capitalism, a danse macabre on the grave of the 20th century.

The “Case History” pictures have compelled, disturbed and enraged viewers for two decades now, with a corpus of academic literature now trailing behind them. They certainly defy Ukraine’s current projection of itself through viral propaganda, though with their indictment of local corruption, the images in “Case History” also call forward to Ukraine’s two revolutions of the 2000s: the Orange Revolution of 2004 and especially the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, which pushed the whole country, Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking alike, into a new democratic era.

Mikhailov and his wife were in Kyiv during the 2014 revolution, and his images of Maidan display an atypical sincerity even as they bristle with the anticipation of war. He returned to hand-coloring for these pictures: yellow outlines of placards, white stripes framing protesters. Black brushstrokes streak above the barricades, and wipe across the neo-Baroque, 200-foot Ukrainian independence monument that lords over the capital’s central plaza.

I’d stood there in Kyiv this past summer, looking up at that kitschy angel, who looked back down onto the square that the invading army planned to parade through and never reached. To see it again, through Mikhailov’s eyes, was to see at last how all of the parts fit together: the trashy and the conceptual, the heroic and the parodic, the busted utopias of the past century and the Ukrainian bravery of 2022.

“Soviet history gave us a common culture, and we had a connection to Moscow, but less and less with time,” Mikhailov told me. “And this is why Maidan happened: because people waited and waited and did not get anything.” He showed me a photo from Kyiv, one more ironic record from a lifetime spent under misrule, and said: “Whatever system there might have been, it was broken, and it brought a lot of grief. But on the other hand, that grief made the country.”

[Jason Farago, critic at large for the New York Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad.  In 2022, he was awarded one of the inaugural Silvers-Dudley Prizes for criticism and journalism.  Milana Mazaeva provided translation support for this article.]

*  *  *  *
MAISON EUROPÉENNE DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE (MEP), PARIS 

The Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) is a photography exhibition center that opened in 1996.  It’s run by the association Paris Audiovisuel – Maison Européenne de la Photographie, founded in 1978 by Jacques Chirac (1932-2019), then mayor of Paris (1977-95) and financially supported by the City of Paris, which provides the building.  (Chirac was later also Prime Minister of France, 1974-76 and 1986-88, and President of the Republic, 1995-2007.)

The MEP is housed in the Hotel Henault de Cantobre, which was built in 1706 and has belonged to the City of Paris since 1914.  It contains an exhibition center, a 36,000-book library, an auditorium, and a video viewing facility with a wide selection of about 1,000 films.

The MEP is designed to make the three fundamental photographic media (exhibition prints, the printed page, and film) easily accessible to all and offers guided tours, conferences, and film series related to the exhibits.  

The MEP’s collection, dedicated to contemporary work, has more than 20,000 pieces, mainly photographs (film and digital) and videos (artists’ DVDs), as well as a wide range of reference books on photography, including both books by artists and technical or theoretical writings, including many rare editions.  

The facility also has a photographic restoration and conservation workshop (ARCP or, Atelier de Restauration et de Conservation des Photographies de la Ville de Paris – Workshop for the Restoration and Conservation of Photographs of the City of Paris).  Since 1983, it’s worked to preserve the photographic heritage of the libraries, archives, and museums of Paris, and it offers its services to other French or foreign institutions as well.

*  *  *  *
BIOGRAPHY OF BORIS MIKHAILOV 

Boris Andreyevich Mikhailov (Ukrainian: Борис Андрійович Михайлов; sometimes romanized as Borys Andriyovych Mykhailov) was born on 25 August 1938 in the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine, when it was still part of the Soviet Union.  He used to split his time between Kharkiv and Berlin, but as of this year, he’s moved permanently to Berlin.

Mikhailov is considered a classic of modern photography and one of the premier media artists, a master of photomontage.  Mikhailov’s art has a conceptual and socio-documentary character.  His works record changes in everyday life and society that took place at the end of the USSR and after its collapse.

Winner of the prestigious Hasselblad Foundation Award in 2000, awarded in Sweden to “a photographer recognized for major achievements,” his album Unfinished Dissertation (Zürich, 1998) was named one of the top ten best photo albums in the world.  In 2014, he was made an Honorary Academician of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine.

Mikhailov graduated from the Kharkiv Institute of Municipal Construction in 1962.  He began his career and first photographic experiments in Kharkiv.  His works became symbols of social documentary photography.

After graduating from the Kharkiv Institute, Mikhailov was sent to various machine plants around the USSR as an engineer, ending up at a plant back in Kharkiv.  He almost immediately volunteered to make a film about the plant.  

To study the history of the plant, he was sent to the State Film Fund of the USSR, the state archive of films of the Soviet Union, where he got access to documentary films about the children’s labor colony for the homeless.  Studying archival materials, Mikhailov worked with documentary and social photography, which influenced the focus of his photography.  Creating a film about the plant, he actively shot while studying the basics of Soviet official photography.

In the early ’60s, Mikhailov joined the film club at the regional House of Amateur Art of the Trade Unions, where the classes were conducted by Soviet documentary filmmaker and screenwriter Aron Kanevsky (1920–2000), who officially covered the scandalous trial of members of a Kharkiv youth counterculture (stilyagi) called Blue Horse who wanted to explore American and European culture, fashion, and music.  A group of the youths were attacked in the late 1950s and nude photographs taken by members of the group were confiscated, later to be used in their trials.

Conversations with Kanevsky, whose stories about the trial of the stilyagi who sought freedom and became interested in the Beatles, jazz, and rock ’n’ roll (all taboo in the USSR), and were unfairly punished for it, influenced Mikhailov’s perception of life and photography.  

Actively engaged in photography and obtaining the kind of results that gave him confidence, in the mid-’60s, Mikhailov moved from a film to still photography.  He had his first exhibition at the end of the 1960s.   In 1969, however, the KGB found nude images of his wife in the photo laboratory, he was dismissed from the plant.  He gave up engineering and took up photography full time.

Following on his learning about the Blue Horse incident, personal experience of injustice and problems with the KGB, along with reports of Stalin’s repressions and internment camps, give Mikhailov a different understanding of the Soviet Union and its duality.  He gained an understanding of the possibility of criminal behavior of the Soviet authorities and this informed his critical thinking in ways that affected his photography.

From 1968 to 1975 he shot several series documenting everyday scenes depicting life in the USSR.  Within these pictures, the photographer secreted critical comments of the existing Soviet political circumstances.

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Mikhailov traveled and formed relationships with photography artists in places like Lithuania and Moscow.  He was becoming well known and respected in Eastern Europe.  With the beginning of perestroika, the program of reconstruction of Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022; General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: 1985-91; President of the Soviet Union: 1990-91), he became a prominent member of the Soviet unofficial photography movement.

By the 1990s, the Ukrainian artist was being shown worldwide and in 2004, he took up residence part time in Berlin.  In 2022, he moved there full time.  He has received many international awards and honors, and he’s worked as a visiting professor at many prestigious schools and universities: the Department of Visual Environmental Research at Harvard University (2000) and the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts (2002-03); in 2008, he was elected Academician of the German Academy of Arts in Berlin.

Faye Schulman (1919-2021)

 

[In my recent post “Latter-Day Esthers & Women Maccabees” (Rick On Theater, 24 April 2021), one if the articles in the compilation mentioned in passing that “a 19-year-old photographer named Faye Schulman joined the partisans, participated in combat missions and performed surgery.”  As it happens, the post date for that article (“The Nazi-Fighting Women of the Jewish Resistance” by Judy Batalion, published in the New York Times on 21 March 2021) was the day Schulman died in Toronto at 101 years of age. 

[Schulman’s obituary, written by Sam Roberts, appeared in the Times on 2 June (the online version was posted on the Times’ website on 28 May).  Upon doing a little cursory research on the ’Net, I’ve decided to read some additional articles on this Nazi-fighter for a supplemental post.  

[Coincidentally, I’m currently working on a post based on my travel journal for a trip to Israel and Egypt.  I’ve just finished the section covering my visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in the outskirts of Jerusalem.  A feature of the memorial site is the Pillar of Heroism (Buky Schwartz, sculptor; 1970), honoring Jews who fought the Nazis.  Faye Schulman is one of those.]

Faigel Lazebnik was born in Sosnkowicze in eastern Poland (renamed Lenin after 1939, and now located in western Belarus) on 28 November 1919.  She was known as Faye (and became Schulman when she married Morris Schulman, an accountant she knew from before the war, in 1944).  

Germany invaded Poland from the west on 1 September 1939, triggering the outbreak of World War II in Europe, and almost immediately afterwards, on 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded from the east.  Schulman’s native country was once again partitioned and remained split between the Nazis and the Soviets until 22 June 1941.

That was the start of Operation Barbarossa, the name of the Axis’s invasion of the Soviet Union.  Germany and its allies planned to get to the USSR through Byelorussia (now called Belarus); to get into Byelorussia, the Wehrmacht had to cross soviet-occupied eastern Poland.  The Red Army accommodated the Germans in their initial gambit by collapsing quickly and the Poles exchanged occupying Russians for occupying Germans.

After the Nazis invaded eastern Poland, Schulman’s Orthodox Jewish family was imprisoned in a ghetto along with the rest of the Jews of Lenin (as the town was now known, named for Lena, the daughter of a local aristocrat, not Vladimir Lenin, the communist leader).  On 14 August 1942, German soldiers killed 1,850 Jews, the last living in the town, including much of Schulman’s family: her parents, her sisters, and her younger brother.  26 Jews were reprieved because their skills might be “useful”: shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, a printer, and a barber.

And one photographer: Faye Schulman.  She was also spared because her photographic skills might come in handy.  Her older brother Moishe had a photography studio in Lenin and Schulman had been his apprentice since she was 10.   Schulman had taken over the studio when she was 16.

Faye Shulman was recruited to take portrait photos of the German officers—and often their new Polish mistresses—and documentational photographs of the Nazis at their activities.  She also processed pictures taken by others, and on one roll, she developed a photograph which showed a mass grave of Jews who’d been executed.  She recognized her own family dead in the trench, and this convinced her, at 22, to join the resistance.  

The young photographer started surreptitiously making copies of the photos she was printing for the Nazis, keeping photographic documentation of their atrocities and war crimes.  The Germans had spared her a firing squad mostly out of their own vanity, but their obsession for record-keeping would help Schulman and others like her win the battle after the war—the battle to remember, to bear witness.

Shulman joined the Moltova Brigade which was composed mostly of Soviet prisoners of war who had escaped German captivity, and worked for them as a nurse from September 1942 to July 1944.  She had learned a little about medicine from her brother-in-law who was a doctor, but her real training came from the unit’s medic who’d been a veterinarian in peacetime.  She once had to bite off a fighter’s wounded finger after anesthetizing him with vodka.  

At the same time, Schulman fought beside her resistance comrades in the forests of Eastern Europe.  She even slept with a rifle.  In the earlier post, Schulman is quoted as lamenting: “When it was time to hug a boyfriend, I was hugging a rifle.” 

Along with caring for the wounded, she foraged for food and sabotaged Wehrmacht facilities and harassed Nazi soldiers in the marshes and woods of Byelorussia. 

When her partisan unit raided her hometown, she retrieved her camera and processing equipment.  She began documenting the life of the resistance fighters.  She also took over 100 photographs after getting her photographic equipment back.  Her pictures documented German atrocities and resistance activities. 

Schulman was one of the only known Jewish partisan photographers.  Her goal, she has said, was to show that “Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter.  I was a photographer.  I have pictures.  I have proof.”  According to the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation (JPEF), there were 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish men and women who fought against the Nazis and their collaborators as partisans in World War II.

As a member of the Moltova Brigade, Schulman had to keep her Jewish identity secret.  The Russian fighters had little use for her as a woman, but discovering she was a Jew would have led to her expulsion from the group—or worse.  Despite her service as both a nurse and a fighter, the anti-Semitism of her fellow partisans was intense.  At Passover time, when her Orthodox faith forbade her to eat many foods, especially leavened bread, she ate only potatoes without explaining the reason.

In July 1944, when the Soviet army liberated Byelorussia, Schulman left the partisans.  She found that her brother Moishe had also escaped Poland and, with a second brother, Kopel, joined another resistance group.  With them, she met another Jewish fighter, a friend and comrade of Moishe’s whom she’d known at home—Morris Schulman.  They were married in December.

After the war, the Schulmans lived in Pinsk, then a city in Soviet Byelorussia.  (Until 1939, when the USSR annexed the eastern part of Poland, Pinsk had been a Polish city.)  They lived well enough as decorated Soviet and Byelorussian heroes, and Faye Schulman worked for a while as a photographer.  But Faye and Morris said Pinsk reminded them of a “graveyard” and they wanted to emigrate to Palestine, which was still under the British Mandate in 1945.

They left Byelorussia and the Soviet east for a displaced persons camp in U.S.-occupied Germany.  The Landsberg DP Camp was in southwest Bavaria, west of Munich and the Schulmans spent three years here, trying to gain admission to Palestine.  During that time, they worked with an underground organization that smuggled Jews into Palestine.

In 1948, Faye gave birth to her daughter, Susan, and she and Morris decided to emigrate to Canada for the stability and quieter life.  After moving to Toronto, where they spent the rest of their lives, Faye Schulman worked in a dress factory and later hand-tinted photographs and painted.  

Morris was employed as a laborer and then worked in the dress factory as a cutter.  The couple eventually opened a successful hardware store.  Morris Schulman died on 22 March 1992 at 81 and, this past 24 April, Faye Schulman passed away at 101.

In addition to the honors from Byelorussia and the USSR, the two were also decorated by Canada and the United States.  Faye was survived by a brother, a rabbi, and the pair left behind a daughter and a son, six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. 

Faye Schulman also left for posterity over a hundred of the photos she took during the war and preserved. 

She also preserved the camera she used back then, the old-fashioned kind with the fold-out bellows.  She treasured it . . . but she never took another picture with it.

[Faye Schulman published a 1995 autobiography titled A Partisan’s Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust (Second Story Press) and appeared in a 1999 PBS documentary, Daring to Resist: Three Women Face the Holocaust, which aired on 24 September 2000 on WNET, Channel 13 in New York City.

[Pictures of Resistance: The Wartime Photography of Jewish Partisan Faye Schulman is a traveling exhibit of Schulman’s wartime photos that’s been displayed in more than 30 cities in the United States, Canada, Israel, Poland, South Africa, and Switzerland.  The exhibit is organized by the JPEF, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California, that produces short films and other educational materials on the history and life lessons of the Jewish partisans.]

Art in D.C. (Dec. ’09-Jan. ’10)

I made my usual year-end trip to Washington to spend the holidays with my mother and to check in with friends and family down there. Normally, I see some theater in D.C. as well as movies and art exhibits; it’s even a semi-tradition for Mom and me to go to a play on New Year’s Eve and get home before the ball drops in New York. This year, however, there weren’t any appropriate shows to see over the whole period, much less 31 December, so I have nothing to report about on that front. I did see several flicks on my vacation, but I don’t generally do film commentary. As it happens, though, among the art shows I saw was the exhibit of the terra cotta warriors of Xi’an, on display through March at the National Geographic Museum—an experience well worth recording. Chronologically, the terra cotta soldiers were the last of the exhibits I saw in Washington, so I’ll start with the other shows first and build up to the pièce de resistance, as it were, in part two of this report. I think that’ll work out nicely.

We began on Sunday, 27 December, at the Phillips Collection, one of the many private art museums in the city, which was hosting Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens, a fascinating show not only for the art on display but its curatorial concept as well. I’m not a great fan of Man Ray or of photography as art, but some of you may know that I have a strong interest in African art, starting back in the ‘70s when my dad got involved with the private predecessor of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, one of the two underground galleries on the Mall. The idea of Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens is that the Western art community of the early decades of the 20th century became so engaged by African art that they not only elevated it from anthropological and ethnographic artifacts, as it had been considered until that point, to objects of art and pure aesthetics, but they appropriated many of the objects themselves for their own art work. This was especially true, it appears, of the photographers who directly featured African pieces as props in their portraits and photographic still lifes. (This isn’t a new idea for an art exhibit. The Museum of African Art, the precursor to the NMAA, kept a permanent display of modern works by such artists as Modigliani and Picasso alongside the African pieces that may have inspired them. The photographs, of course, manifest this influence more literally, and many of the African objects in the show are the original ones depicted in the photos.) The Phillips exhibit placed the Western photos near the African objects they depicted giving the spectators a chance to appreciate both the modern Western art and the often superb African carvings, masks, and other objects which had inspired them. A double whammy, so to speak. (If you’re a devotee of photography, especially late 19th- and early 20th-century photography, this is an irresistible set-up. It was the African sculptures that most delighted me, however. As I’ve remarked before, these works are astonishingly beautiful.)

The Phillips show, assembled by Wendy Goodman, includes over 100 photos, more than half by Ray himself (born Emmanuel Radnitsky of Brooklyn), and over 20 masks, carved figures, and practical items from several African cultures (and a few Oceanic peoples). The exhibit can be viewed from several perspectives: it can be seen as evidence of Western imperialism, appropriating the cultural objects of African peoples for Western consumption and paying no heed to the cultures from which they were lifted; it can be seen as a form of cultural racism with undertones of slavery and oppression, as a white, European culture pillages the imagery and expressions of a dark-skinned populace for its own pleasure; it can represent, as it did for many African-American artists, a search for black cultural roots that predate American slavery and European colonialism; it can demonstrate the rejection of the West’s descent into war and destruction and the dehumanization of the mechanical age that gave us bombs, tanks, fighter planes, and machine guns, in favor of a purer, less debased culture; it can even manifest an homage to the accomplishments and artistry of hitherto overlooked peoples. (The Dada artists, whose work was the subject of terrific recent exhibit at NGA and then MoMa, reacted against this same early-20th-century development that arrived in the guise of Word War I. Ray was a participant in this fascinating art movement, too.) In the days of Man Ray and the other artists represented at the Phillips, art such as that of Africa, Oceania, Native Americans, and other non-Western peoples was called “primitive,” now considered a demeaning description; today this kind of work is called “naïve,” meaning only that the artists came by their techniques naturally, without the benefit of professional training. But “naïve” can also imply that the art—and the artists—have been untouched by the so-called worldliness and sophistication that turns to cynicism and negativity. Untainted. Unadulterated. A Romantic viewpoint, perhaps, but not uncomplimentary or denigrating. (It is also not a comment on the quality of the work, which even an untrained eye can see is complex, profound, and meaningful. It’s merely a distinction of the source of the techniques, which are traditional instead of schooled.) As Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post noted, in this side-by-side exhibit, the Western works “come off as weaker” than the much bolder, more robust (less effete?) African works. The arch-conservative Washington Times posited that Man Ray, African Art . . . failed to avoid “relegating non-Western art to a supporting role” in the modern trends of Western abstraction, but my own apolitical perspective is simply that these are immensely beautiful works of art which the Western artists, irrespective of their feelings or ignorance about the cultures from which the objects came, saw and appreciated. Nonetheless, the photos do show the African objects without reference to their cultural matrix or the purposes for which they were made. Maybe I’m the one who’s naïve.

One thing that struck me, though there’s no reification of this sidelight in the exhibit lit or the criticism, is the several different purposes the photographs in the exhibit served. One, starting with the Alfred Stieglitz photo at the beginning of the show, was archival rather than artistic. Stieglitz, Walker Evans, and Ray were all commissioned at one time or another to record the holdings of private collectors or the works displayed in museum or dealer exhibitions, including the now-famous 1935 MoMA show, African Negro Art (recorded by Evans). A second purpose, related to the archival use, was what I’d call documentary. A number of the pictures in the Phillips show were merely records of an example of African art, really an anthropological artifact which takes on other layers of meaning because, first, the objects depicted are so stunning and, second, because they are being displayed here, among other, clearly aesthetically-oriented photos. (These same sorts of photographs, if collected into a catalogue, might still be beautiful because the subjects are, but the photos—as distinguished from the African objects themselves—wouldn’t be seen as art, just illustrations.)

Undoubtedly these two kinds of pictures helped spread the appeal and the mystique of African artworks during the 1910s, ‘20s, and ‘30s, especially among the artists of the period. Deborah Dietsch, the Washington Times reviewer, noted that the paintings of Lois Mailou Jones, a Harlem Renaissance artist whose works were among the only paintings in the Phillips show, took their inspiration not perhaps from the actual African objects she depicted but from Evans’s archival photos from the MoMA exhibit. But the most interesting photographs at the Phillips were, as you might imagine, the art prints, the ones taken as art, composed, lit, and printed to be aesthetic objects. The acclaimed star of these pictures was Ray’s Noire et blanche, taken for Paris Vogue in 1926. The photo shows a pale, dark-haired woman lying on her side, photographed from the bust up only, holding upright a small, dark, carved African mask. (The mask, from the Baule people in Ivory Coast, is included in the exhibit.) The model’s white face is horizontal, juxtaposed with the black mask-face at a right angle just below her chin, standing vertical, manifesting a contrast not only of black and white, but of length and height. The woman’s face is soft and (apparently) powdered; the mask is hard and shiny, adding another level of contrast. The woman’s hair is short and combed flat, a boy’s cut; the mask’s coiffure is elaborate and high. (In an almost whimsical addenda, Ray also printed the shot in reverse contrast, a “negative” print with the white model’s face dark and the African mask light.) Gopnik of the Post observed that, though the title of the picture is often translated as “Black and White,” Ray seems to have intended it to mean “Black Woman and White Woman”: though the French adjective noire doesn’t inflect for gender, blanche is the feminine form for ‘white’; ordinarily, ‘black and white’ would simply be noire et blanc unless a feminine noun were implied. (Other photos at the Phillips were by James L. Allen and Cecil Beaton.)

Aside from masks and carved figurines, on display were also a number of wonderful African beaded hats, depicted in several fashion photos, a collection of ivory bracelets belonging to Nancy Cunard, the British shipping heiress, and other practical objects like pitchers, bowls, a stool, and a door. (African art objects are almost all made for use or worship; few African cultures created purely aesthetic or decorative objects—except in recent decades for Western consumption. Really old African pieces are rare because they simply get used up. This is compounded because African work is seldom composed of stone or metal; it’s mostly perishable material.) Nonetheless, it was these pieces which “grabbed” me—as Gopnik wrote, though in a different context. A 16-inch Kanyok half-figure (a woman carved from the waist up, but with feet serving as a base!), was particularly enchanting, with an expressive, only slightly stylized heart-shaped face topped with an elaborate hair-do of several curled lobes of hair (picture an Africanized geisha wig). I will only add that there were many other objects in the exhibit that I wouldn’t mind having in my living room. Some of you may recollect my mother and my imaginary midnight shopping trips, and my vote this time would have gone to the 13-inch Yoruba mother-and-child figure with a lidded bowl. The woman, with a baby seated on her rump, also wears a lobed hairstyle and is well dressed. She’s carrying a large, covered bowl, and as the baby grips her around the waist, she grips the bowl in front of her. Carved in a nearly-Realistic style, the detail is incredible: the fabric pattern in the woman’s dress, her bracelets and necklace, the baby’s anklet, the texture of her hair. It’s altogether stunning. (Both these objects are shown in Man Ray photos from about 1933, part of his commission to record the collection of Carl Kjersmeier, a Danish collector.)

The Man Ray, African Art . . . exhibit closed at the Phillips on 10 January, but it’s a touring show and will appear elsewhere around North America, including the UNM Art Museum, Albuquerque (6 February–30 May ), UVa Art Museum, Charlottesville (7 August-10 October), and Museum of Anthropology at UBC, Vancouver (29 October-23 January 2011).

On Sunday, 3 January, we drove down to the Mall (it was way too cold to wait for busses in exposed sidewalk shelters) and, after finding the perfect parking space (the remaining holiday tourists apparently having stayed in their hotels, much to our benefit), we walked a half block to the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum to catch the last day of Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection. Truitt is an artist of whom I hadn’t heard; my mother is much more up on the mid-century artists than I am. (Two years ago, Mom introduced me to the work of Morris Louis, a contemporary of Truitt’s who had also had a show at the Hirshhorn.) A bit of history first, then: Washington had never been much of a theater city until the 1970s when a number of Off-Broadway-level (and several more Off-Off-Broadway-level) theaters opened there, supplementing the Arena Stage, the city’s principal rep company (founded in 1950), and the National Theatre, its legit house (opened in 1835) . (The Kennedy Center opened at the start of this period, 1971, greatly expanding the city’s theatrical offerings and its cachet.) But since at least the post-World War II years, the Nation’s Capital has been a true art center. Not only have the big museums such as the National Gallery, the Phillips Collection, and the Corcoran Gallery long been important venues for displaying and viewing art of many cultures and eras, but Washington had long had a vibrant retail gallery presence, catering to the many collectors in the metropolitan area and beyond. (Full disclosure: my parents became part owners of one of these galleries in 1956 or so, when I was still in single digits. The partners liquidated the gallery in about 1960 and it no longer exists.) But all of these facts aren’t what made Washington an art center. That would be the community of artists, some native Washingtonians (we were rare in those days), others born elsewhere but drawn to the active art scene there. Not a few well-known figures came out of this scene over the decades, and there was even a Washington Color School in the middle of the last century. Some of the painters in this group included Louis, Kenneth Noland (who died 5 January), Gene Davis, Howard Mehring, Tom Downing, and Paul Reed. (A more current artist associated with the Washington Colorists is Sam Gilliam who happens to have been a friend of my parents and an artist some of whose works both my mother and I own.)

Another associate of the Washington Color School was Anne Truitt, who began her career in the late 1940s. Born in Baltimore in 1921, Truitt grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She moved to Washington in 1947 and, except for periods abroad (her husband, James Truitt, was a journalist), she lived the rest of her life in the Capital. After working in psychology and writing fiction, Truitt turned to art. She started with sculpting in clay, cement, and stone, but in the early 1960s, she abandoned and even destroyed much of this work. A 1961 exhibit at the Guggenheim, American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists, changed Truitt’s whole perspective and she turned to minimalist geometric abstraction. These works include First (1961), essentially three slats of a white picket fence, and Southern Elegy (1962), a black-and-green, arched tablet shaped like a gravestone. (These works are included among the 49 sculptures and 35 paintings and drawings in Perception and Reflection.) Shortly afterwards, Truitt moved beyond even these abstractions and started producing what became her signature form: highly colored wooden columns. (Ken Johnson in the New York Times described these as “resembling models of Modernist skyscrapers.”) With this step, the artist moved not only into the interstice between Color Field painting and Minimalist sculpture, but she focused entirely on color to express her intent, as the columns were undifferentiated (though they varied in size and dimensions) and unrepresentational. She used many shades of non-prime colors, sometimes applying varying hues of the same color, other times using two or three contrasting colors. The paint was carefully applied by hand in alternating brush strokes of vertical and horizontal for each layer, so that the finish was smooth and hard. The artist sometimes varied the appearance not by contrasting colors or even hues, but finishes, using a matte surface to set off a glossy one. Truitt completed her last columns, Return and Evensong, just before her death in December 2004.

Curator Kristen Hileman called Truitt “a pioneering but understudied figure” and suggested that her work is “ripe for rediscovery and ready to be considered on its own terms.” I demur. Gopnik of the Post said Truitt’s art is “sociable”; the works “keep you company.” For me, not so much. She’s a figure of curiosity because of her placement in the continuum of art history, her association with artists like Louis, Noland, Minimalist Donald Judd, and Abstract Expressionists Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, and her membership in the Washington art world. But her art itself leaves me cold. Some of the colorful columns are pretty in a neutral sort of way, but they don’t “grab” me at all (and I wouldn’t want to come back after closing to nick one). Noland’s paintings are bright and striking, crossing between Colorism and Op Art, and they can be exciting to look at. The optics of the geometric shapes and the brilliant colors he used makes them seem to pulse and spin (a phenomenon Hans Hofmann described as “plasticity”). Louis’s poured stains, also brightly colored, seem to run off the untreated canvases into an undefined future somewhere. Suggesting flowers, rainbows, flowing ribbons, his art bursts off the canvas in upredictable ways to give the sense of a living force. Truitt’s columns (there are examples of some of her other forms, except some aluminum sculptures she made during a period in Japan and which she destroyed) are all restraint and coldness to me. They’re almost studied, remote, lifeless. That’s the problem with “bare-bones” art—it has no life in it! That’s not for me.

On Tuesday, 5 January, we drove down to the Mall again to see the exhibit at the National Gallery’s East Building of the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection: Selected Works. Continuing at the NGA until 2 May, this isn’t an exhibit of the works of one artist or a period or theme of artworks assembled by some museum curator. It’s a display of pieces from the private collection of a Baltimore real estate developer and his wife which the couple has bequeathed to the NGA. The full collection is some 300 pieces of 20th-century art, which the Meyerhoffs began collecting in the 1950s and continued to amass into the early years of this century. (Jane Meyerhoff died in 2004; Robert Meyerhoff, 85, is still alive but has already begun to turn over their holdings to the gallery. The current show includes 126 pieces.) The Meyerhoffs began buying art by many artists of the mid-century, both European and American, but shortly after starting their collection, they concentrated on six notable American artists: Jasper Johns (whom the Meyerhoffs must have really loved because there are far more Johnses in the collection than any other two artists on exhibit), Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella (there’s a whole gallery of one series of Stella’s wall-mounted, found-object sculptures, all titled with variations on Playskool). The collection and the exhibit, which include many other artists in addition to this focal group, embrace both paintings (and some drawings) and sculptures; it is, in a way, a study in depth of the development of a segment of modern American art from the ‘50s to the ‘80s and ‘90s. Some of the artists made a step-by-step journey into maturity and refinement of their techniques and styles; others progressed by leaps and turns, seemingly trying on a new dynamic every year or so. This being less than half of the Meyerhoff holdings, it’s amusing to try to imagine what their home must have been like with all or most of their art on display. David Lloyd Kreeger, at least, built himself an actual museum to live in until he died and could have his former home opened to the public. The Meyerhoffs' taste in art, by the way, seems to have been better than Kreeger’s.)

The Meyerhoff gift, which is the largest single donation since the founding of the NGA and the gifts of Andrew Mellon and the other original benefactors in 1937, was actually announced in 1987. (Beginning in 1986, the Meyerhoffs had donated many individual pieces of art and money for the purchase of works independent of this single gift.) Part of the arrangement is that part of the collection will be held by the NGA in Washington and part will remain at the Meyerhoffs’ estate in Phoenix, Maryland. It is the first permanent location for art in the NGA's collection remote from the museum’s base on the Mall. The estate, which will not be part of the NGA but be maintained privately by a foundation formed by the Meyerhoffs for that purpose, will open to the public on Meyerhoff’s death, but works from his holdings are already being transferred to the gallery’s ownership. Now, I won’t say that the whole Meyerhoff Collection delights me—one of the Pollocks on display (Ritual, 1953), for instance, is an unprepossessing example of his work as far as I’m concerned—but quite a few of the pieces are great additions to the national art collection and the Meyerhoff holdings as a whole is a true treasure. (It’s a good point to note that all the Smithsonian museums, both on the Mall and elsewhere around the country, are open free to all visitors every day of the year except 25 December; the NGA is also closed on 1 January. It’s one of the best deals the taxpayers get from our government. The fees for places like the Phillips, the Corcoran, MoMA, the Goog, and so on keep going up—and they close some days—but the NGA and the Smithsonians are there, free, and available! I’m for that!)

The principal peculiarity of the Meyerhoff exhibit is that it’s not organized by artist, subject, or date. Curator Harry Cooper arranged the pieces by themes—somewhat recondite categories, in my opinion, but nevertheless . . . . Some of Cooper’s distinctions depend on visual aspects of the works, some on the method of making the pieces. The ten divisions—Scrape, Concentricity, Line, Gesture, Art on Art, Drip, Stripe to Zip, Figure or Ground, Monochrome, and Picture the Frame—were devised to accommodate as many different artists as possible in each theme (there’s a Johns in most of the sections), so the galleries are an almost haphazard selection of works from the Meyerhoffs’ holdings. (I confess, I didn’t pay as much attention to the categories as I moved through the show as I perhaps ought to have for the curator’s purposes. I just enjoyed the individual pieces as I came upon them. Doing that, the art seems much like the arrangement you might find in someone’s home—a very big home, granted, with a lot of very expensive art on the walls, but most collectors don’t hang their art according to some academic taxonomy, do they? They display it the way it seems most pleasing to them, without regard to who hangs next to whom. That’s how I do it—with my dozen-and-a-half, mostly unknown works! I’m just sayin’ . . . .) Anyway, I guess curators have to justify their salaries. No harm, no foul, I suppose.

Most of the Meyerhoff holdings fall into the style of Abstract Expressionism and its immediate descendents. (Their first purchase, 1957’s Autumn Gold by Hans Hofmann, one of the founders of Abstract Expressionism in the United States, is on display at the entrance to the exhibit.) Next to Impressionism and its offspring, Abstract Expressionism is my favorite style of painting. In addition to Ritual, about which Blake Gopnik wrote an entire essay for the Washington Post, there’s a 1951 Pollock (Untitled), a black and white drip painting (it’s actually ink on Japanese paper), that I’d happily hang on a wall at home. The Rothkos, Franz Klines, and Barnett Newmans are bold, colorful, and expressive, stirring emotions and thoughts (unlike, say, the Truitt monoliths of the previous exhibit) that are too rapid and uncontrollable to capture much less articulate—which, to my way of thinking, is what Expressionism is supposed to do. Even the Minimalists and Op Artist like Ellsworth Kelly, Ad Reinhardt, and Frank Stella excited my senses even if they were less emotionally stimulating. I’ve always gotten a kick out of Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop Art, too, and the exhibit included a bronze sculpture, Sleeping Muse (1983), which was essentially a cast version of one of his paintings abstracted to lines and curves. In fact, it put me in mind of a Minimalist sculpture of the model’s face from Man Ray’s Noire et blanche! It’s the face of a woman, depicted in outline and a few abstract details formed by lines, lying on its side facing the viewer. The open-work bronze casting is patinated in forest green. I can tell you, I’d find a place for that in my apartment in a New York minute!

That Gopnik essay in the Post, bemoaning the lack of “rudeness” in the once-provocative and ‑challenging art in the collection, was called “The sweet smell of success, and the scent of an iconoclast.” The art reviewer began by asserting, “Success may be the worst thing that can happen to modern art. When a radical work gets taken up by wealthy collectors and big-time museums, it risks becoming a marker of cultural status instead of creative achievement.” I’m nowhere near enough of an art critic to know if there’s any truth to Gopnik’s opinion, but I do wonder where he’s going. Is this somehow the fault of the artwork or the artists? Okay, there was a movement, Conceptual Art (and a few similar doctrines) that insisted that art was not a consumer product and deliberately made art that wouldn’t last beyond the creative moment. But most art, radical or conventional, is made to attract attention from viewers and, therefore, also buyers and exhibiters. It goes with the territory. Indeed, it’s how most artists make their livings. And their points. An artist who sets out to make art that won’t become desirable, that persistently affronts viewers, isn’t going to last too long—unless she likes shouting out in the wilderness. So whose fault is this phenomenon, then? The critics and reviewers who offer positive opinions on the art and thus make it appealing to potential purchasers and museums? So, what? They should just stop rendering positive opinions? That’ll work. Is it the fault of the spectators who come to appreciate a work of art, making it popular and enrolling it in the established canon. And who is it who controls that? That’s right . . . no one.

Gopnik went to the Meyerhoff show looking for a piece of once-radical art that “simply refused to play nice, however much money and prestige it’s been draped in.” He was generally disappointed except for the one Pollock, Ritual, which he described as “gloriously rude and ugly, and has stayed that way despite the passing of time and the canonization of the maker.” Well, okay. In the writer’s opinion, here was a work that didn’t age badly, according to his standards. Where does that leave the rest of the collection, even the rest of the mid-century American experiment in provocative forms? Just relegate it to the trash heap of art history? Unhappily or not, the works of all kinds of innovative artists eventually become mainstream and acceptable—sometimes because we’ve learned the lessons the artists was trying to teach. Look at Ibsen’s plays, especially Doll House. That caused riots when it was published; Ibsen was breaking all kinds of taboos, both theatrical and social, with his Realism and the portrayal of Nora, the wife who leaves her husband and family. Ghosts, with its frank depiction of syphilis and moral decadence, was almost as inflammatory. But Ibsen’s theater eventually became the norm, in terms of both its frankness and its stage style. The power of Ibsen’s plays is still there, however. Maybe no one will riot in the streets afterwards, but Ghosts and Doll House and Hedda Gabler can still make us pull up short and ask questions. They still challenge us, and when I look at the other Pollocks, the Rothkos, the Kellys, the Louises, the Nolands, and the works of other such artists from half a century or so ago, the ones who thrilled and excited us, who provoked and frightened us, who moved us to wonder and question, and explore—they still do. Well, they do me, anyway. I wonder if perhaps it isn’t the art that has become tame, but jaded viewers like Gopnik who’ve lost their sense of excitement. (Of course, maybe that’s just me being naïve again. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, either.)

[Not many viewers, I don’t think, would have trouble getting excited about the Chinese terra cotta soldiers on exhibit at the National Geographic Museum. Come back in a day or so for my report on this unique experience.]