268
PARTISAN REVIEW
Montreal in the 1940s by the painters known as
Les Automatistes,
is still
flourishing.
A profound awareness of the pleasures of the city, even its least ingra–
tiating aspects, was at the heart of the mini-retrospective of Rudy
Burckhardt's photographs at Tibor de Nagy. Just as in his marvelous films
of people moving through urban places, Burckhardt's exacting eye often
focuses on things most of us see only peripherally or take for granted be–
cause of their familiarity - a battered stretch of sidewalk near the 42nd
Street Library, a view of Manhattan from Brooklyn or Queens, an ex–
panse of ordinary rooftops - and forces us to pay attention. Other images,
of more "picturesque" subjects - the Flatiron Building, the bridges across
the East River, a Venetian campo - are transfonned by unexpected view–
points, by momentary effects of light, or by being relegated to the status
of background while Burckhardt concentrates on something else. An ele–
gantly posed black cat, for example, dominates an entrancing image of
Venice, transfonning the familiar architecture into a kind of stage-set, at
the same time that the low viewpoint turns the patterned pavement into a
summary of Renaissance renderings of space. Burckhardt's vision seems
utterly instinctive, effortless, and right; the subtlety and delicate orches–
tration of tones in his photographs, of course, belie this apparent
artlessness. The show, which covered most of Burckhardt's career, also
included telling portraits of artists, family, and friends, and a few landscape
studies. The portraits usually held their own with the superb city images,
but the landscapes were less convincing. Burckhardt seems to be at his
best as a passionate observer of urban life, especially as a connoisseur of
the subtle tonal gradations, the gritty textures, and the surprising juxtapo–
sitions that he reveals to us as essential characteristics of his adopted home,
New York.
What else? A show of inventive, personal stone sculptures by Jon
Isherwood, at Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore. Isherwood, a young Eng–
lish sculptor who has lived in the U.S. for more than a decade, has been
working in stone for about three years, after producing a serious body of
work in steel and concrete that was accomplished, original, and signalled
his discontent with the "tradition" of construction in steel in which he
was trained. Stone allows - or compels - Isherwood to explore fully issues
of mass and volume implicit in his steel and concrete works, as well as
new kinds of surfaces. When he succeeds best, his stone pieces, which are
usually intimate in size - the sculptures at Grimaldis averaged about one
meter in any direction - seem monumental, but human in scale. They are
fairly opaque, their closed faces sometimes rough, sometimes worked, but
generally impenetrable - except where a slot, a "secret passage," like the
entrance to an Egyptian tomb, allows us to realize that the cores of the
