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PARTISAN REVIEW
zones. Bleeds of paint gather themselves into crisply drawn fusions of
the mechanical and the erotic before subsiding into paint again. A chan–
delier seems to thrust one branch out of the plane of the canvas, as
though propelled by the force of a cropped, swirling nude beneath it,
who dissolves into a diaphanous spray of pigment. At once playful and
disturbing, these beautifully painted pictures challenge both the literal
flatness of the canvas and the fictions of illusionistic painting.
Down the hall from McKee, Mary Boone offered Damian Loeb's
recent efforts: crabbed, oversized, hyperrealist views of a scuzzy Amer–
ica populated with anorexic Asian women, tacky buildings and furni–
ture, and vaguely hostile signs. The banality of Loeb's photobased work
was self-evident, but it was neatly underlined by his show's overlapping
with a "real" photography exhibition that instead of simply posturing,
commented profoundly on the appearance and social issues of an ear–
lier moment in twentieth-century America: the Metropolitan's superb
Walker Evans retrospective, a gathering of mysteriously potent, decep–
tively artless images capable of provoking total emotional surrender at
the same time that they inspire coolheaded scrutiny of their formal
means. I should admit that I'm slightly irrational about Evans, ever since
being sandbagged by one of his least prepossessing photos, a seemingly
casual, if elegantly composed shot of a pair of generic pants and an
equally generic shirt hanging on the back of a door-nothing else. As I
looked, a painter friend's name flashed into my head; later, I discovered
that the picture had been made in my friend's house in Maine, where I
had never been. I can't explain it, except as evidence of Evans's ability
to get to the root of things.
At the Met, you watch Evans developing and refining his distinctive
vision, rapidly discovering both the themes and formal means that pre–
occupied him for the rest of his life. The iconic pictures are there-the
sharecroppers' families, the small town Main Streets, the people on the
subway-plus less familiar images, equally cool and mesmerizing, that
enlarge your sense of what Evans was about. An empty street lined
with nineteenth-century factory buildings in Amsterdam, New York,
makes his connection with Eugene Atget palpable, while dispassionate
records of the inhabitants of Southern towns remind you that he
admired the forthright reporting of Matthew Brady.
It
all seems so
effortless, direct, and formally transparent that it takes a while for the
subtlety of Evans's methods to register: the frontality, the truing and
fairing of planes, the acute awareness of patterns, internal rhythms,
and the shapes of things, the unfailing eye for tonal nuance. Like a ver–
nacular Vermeer, Evans captures and endlessly prolongs moments
