continued Mobile Homes: The Art of Rudy Burckhardt
by Vincent Katz

II.  Biography                       
Rudy Burckhardt was born in 1914 in Basel, Switzerland, and grew up there, in the comfortable surroundings of a family which included such luminaries as his grandfather Isaac Iselin -- a general and a judge who was against outlawing the Communist Party -- and, further back, the art historian Jacob Burckhardt, author of The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance.  His father, also Rudolf Burckhardt, was a ribbon manufacturer, who died when Rudy was 14; his mother, Esther Iselin, lived to be 99. 
            Rudy’s youth was one of relative ease and high culture.  The wide-ranging knowledge of the arts instilled in him at an early age provided the basis for his aesthetic outlook the rest of his life.   His was a classical education, meaning he was able to read ancient Greek and Latin poetry, history, and philosophy in the original languages.  Regarding his schooling, Burckhardt makes the following observation: “I had good grades, except for drawing and singing, so when I wanted to make pictures of what I saw around me, I turned to photography, where the lens of the camera does the drawing for you, instead of your own clumsy hand.”
            In 1933, at the age of 19, he went to London, having arranged to study medicine there.  After attending a few lectures, he realized medicine was not for him and never went back.  He did remain in London for a while, however, wandering the streets and taking photographs with a 9 x 12 centimeter German camera.  This was the first of what were to become many city series Burckhardt would make.  These series are each unified by formal patterns.  Such concerns are also expressed in the films he would begin to make a few years later, in which he will present a series of cornices or a series of long shots of cityscapes. 
            His next series was done in Paris, which he visited the following year.  There, using the Leica 35 millimeter camera, which had just come out, he began including people in his photographs as subjects -- people he would encounter at a street fair or simply walking or standing still.  Although he has an interest in billboards and other advertising signs, it is from an aesthetic, not an historical, point of view.  Burckhardt spent little time analyzing the social significance of the people and signs he photographed.  He observed the way they appeared, without any ulterior motive of hoping to change society by what he displayed in his photographs.
            Only one year after his trip to Paris, he made a huge, permanent, leap.  He had already begun to feel dissatisfaction with what he sensed was the provincialism of Switzerland.  In 1934, at age 20, he met Edwin Denby, an American who had studied Grotesktanz (“Eccentric Dancing” or modern dance) in Vienna and was passing through Basel.  Denby had formed a dance company which toured Germany for five years, and he went on to become one of the premier dance critics of the century.  Denby, who was eleven years Burckhardt’s elder, would be quietly influential to many New York artists through the years, particularly Burckhardt.  The two were to spend much of the next fifty years together. 
            Denby was from a powerful American family (his uncle had been implicated in the Teapot Dome Scandal of 1924), had traveled widely, and had met pivotal figures of European and American modernism -- Jean Cocteau, Aaron Copland, Lotte Lenya, Virgil Thomson, and Kurt Weil.  He told Burckhardt about New York -- its sense of ferment with artists being drawn together there -- and Burckhardt listened.  “In Switzerland,” he says, “when somebody wanted to be an artist, they went to Paris, which was about four hours away by train.  I went to Paris, and I liked it alot, but I didn't want to live there.  It seemed not far enough away from Basel.”    Finally, here was a place that seemed far enough away.
            In 1935 -- two years after visiting London, and one year after Paris -- Burckhardt completed his troika and sailed from Le Havre on the S.S. President Roosevelt for New York.  From that date on, though his peregrinations around the world were just beginning, Burckhardt would be based in New York.  He describes how New York affected his photography: “New York was different.  Arriving here in 1935, at age 21, I was overwhelmed by its grandeur and ceaseless energy.  I felt this was the place where I wanted to stay.  The tremendous difference in scale between the soaring buildings and people moving against them in the street astonished me, and it took a couple of years before I felt ready to photograph.”
            Burckhardt made his first two films shortly after arriving in New York, using an American “Victor” 16-millimeter camera with a one-inch lens.  These films were tongue-in-cheek stories with star-studded casts composed of the personalities with whom he now became familiar, partly through Denby’s introductions.  His later films would live up to this initial sense of ebullient camaraderie.  145 West 21 (1936) features composer Aaron Copland and Denby, with Paul Bowles and Virgil Thomson in cameo roles.  Bowles composed music for the film, but it was not transferred to the film and has been lost.  Seeing the World--Part One: A Visit to New York (1937) is a mock travelogue, in which Joseph Cotton, Denby, and Virginia Welles (Orson’s wife) are seen at touristic spots, as well as on the Bowery and Park Avenue.  These films are mini-features, ten minutes each, “made up as they went along,” without a script.  They were not conceived as exercises for something greater but were works in themselves that have the air of improvisation of a children’s play.  As Burckhardt’s filmography reveals, he never wanted to “move beyond” this type of filmmaking, into either commercial features or documentaries, or into museum-style film or video installation.  His features would get a little longer, their stories more elaborate, but they always maintained the freshness of recent invention. 
            In 1938, Burckhardt and Denby took a trip to Haiti.  After a month, Denby returned to New York, but Burckhardt stayed on.  In Haiti, he found a perfect antidote to Basel.  Instead of “lonely and empty and proper and clean” Basel, he found Port-au-Prince lively, crowded, irreverent, and sexy.  He stayed for nine months, living with a beautiful woman named Germaine, whom he photographed.  He also made a 15-minute film in Haiti, which he set to Erik Satie’s alternately melancholy and animated Gymnopédies. 
            Upon his return to New York in 1938, Burckhardt began photographing New York in earnest.  This is the lifelong project which would most frequently occupy him, an ongoing study of people relating to each other within the artificial boundaries of the man-made city.  His first photographs of New York remain among the most memorable ever taken of the city.  Focused as they are on fragments -- legs, feet, torsoes, and their accompanying shoes, stockings, coats, and gloves -- they give an impression of multitudes rushing by too fast to be caught completely.  He photographs on crowded sidewalks, capturing their surging energy, and he photographs in the subway, where the travelers seem suspended against a sea of black.  He also goes to the tops of tall buildings to take photographs that begin to capture the scale of the entire city, from its peaks to the shadows below.
         He had found a contemporary version of the ancient Rome familiar to him from literature.  The people bustling through New York’s streets composed tableaux that, to Burckhardt’s eyes, were every bit as vital and salacious as the plays of Plautus or Tacitus’ accounts of the rule of Nero.  Part of Burckhardt’s legacy from the Classics was the desire to be part of a metropolis -- not just passing through, but as an inhabitant, someone who witnessed the mundanities which often clothe passions equivalent to Rome’s plights, intrigues, and ecstasies.  For the rest of his life, Burckhardt would make images of New York as ancient democracy.  Like Denby, Burckhardt would record contemporary chaos in stabilizing, Classical, terms.  One is reminded of the lines from Denby’s sonnet “Ciampino -- Envoi,” from Mediterranean Cities.  It was written about Rome but it applies equally to New York: “For with regret I leave the lovely world men made/Despite their bad character, their art is mild.”  “Mild” in this case means not “ineffectual,” but rather “casual, suave.”

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