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

During these pre-war days, Burckhardt made another friendship which was to have a lasting impact.  One day, during a furious thundershower, a drenched kitten appeared on the fire-escape of the loft Burckhardt and Denby shared at 145 West 21st Street.  They took it in, dried it off, gave it some milk.  The next day, an attractive man with an accent came knocking on their door, asking for his kitten.  It was Willem de Kooning, and the three soon became friends, spending long nights in conversation.  Burckhardt and Denby bought some of de Kooning’s early paintings, and de Kooning painted Burckhardt’s portrait.  He also gave Burckhardt a painting lesson.
            In this early period, ten years before de Kooning’s first solo exhibition at a New York gallery, the artworld was a private place.  There was little money involved, only the intensity of the work itself.  Perhaps unknown to the participants, they were part of the shifting of the international art center from Paris to New York.  They had all decided to move to New York, perhaps not knowing it would become the center, but sensing its stimulating, as yet undeveloped, social and cultural potentials.  Burckhardt in his photographs has shown New York in all its periods, from province to capital.  His photographs taken in Laurel Hill, Queens, in 1940, show New York as a vacant backwater, no more cosmopolitan than the Alabama towns he photographed a few years later.  After the war, in his photographs of Times Square, Herald Square, and Madison Square, he portrays the energy of a big-time city flexing its muscles.
            Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1941, Burckhardt, who had already served in the Swiss army and had not enjoyed the experience, turned his photographic skill into an avenue to avoid actual conflict.  He got himself stationed on the island of Trinidad, where he was to photograph troop maneuvers and military events.  He spent almost two years on the island, during which time he not only fulfilled his military obligations but also made his own photographs and a film of Trinidadians at work and rest. 
            After the war, Burckhardt continued his travels, photographing in Mexico and back in Europe, where, in 1947 he married the German painter Edith Schloss.  Their son, Jacob, was born in 1949.  In 1948, Burckhardt studied painting with Amadée Ozenfant in New York.  His interest in painting was sporadic.  Although he has painted regularly in the years after the war, it has not been until recently that he has devoted consistent effort to it.  Earlier, it seemed a pleasant activity, a sideline to his photography, which was not only an art but a trade.
            Starting in 1950 and continuing through 1964, Burckhardt photographed for ARTnews magazine, then under the editorship of Thomas Hess.  Burckhardt contributed to a regular series of feature articles, which focused each month on an individual artist working on a particular piece in the studio.  Burckhardt would accompany a writer to the artist’s studio, and the two would document the process, as the artist worked.  Often, the writers were poets -- Frank O’Hara on Fairfield Porter or James Schuyler on Alex Katz.  Elaine de Kooning, a painter and the wife of Willem, also wrote many of these features.  Burckhardt fit the bill perfectly, because the ethos of the articles was one in which artists covered other artists.  His photographs of artists are among the most penetrating ones made of their subjects because they do not avail themselves of the LIFE magazine type hackneyed reportage style.  Rather, they plainly show the details of art-making, details with which Burckhardt was familiar on a daily basis.  Even someone like Hans Namuth, who took marvelous photographs of Pollock, does not have Burckhardt’s casual air, which allows him to insinuate himself into a situation, rather than simply observing it, enabling him to make images like the one of Paul Georges, taken from behind the nude model, with the artist out of focus in the background.
            By 1950, fifteen years after his arrival in New York, Burckhardt had established himself as a figure within New York’s artistic milieu, though already, by adopting a role of self-effacing documenter, he was arguably placing himself out of the limelight.  That year, he undertook a significant trip, which advanced his vision of New York by reviving his sense of an older Europe.  Taking advantage of the G.I. Bill he received as a result of his wartime service, Burckhardt decided to study painting in Naples.  “It was a good deal, the G.I. Bill,” Burckhardt explains.  “You could study anything, anywhere in the world, and they would pay your tuition and give you some money to live on besides.”  Denby accompanied Burckhardt, and it seems their ambitions were not entirely academic.  “We had a little house [in Ischia] for about six months in 1950.  I was supposed to be studying painting at the Academy of Naples, but it was a moth-eaten place.  Professore Notte was an old-fashioned, academic, teacher.  I didn't have to go very often.  I'd take a boat from Ischia...usually once a week.”
            What Burckhardt did do in Naples was to rediscover Europe.  In Naples, he found a city as vibrant, as chaotic, and as full of pleasure as New York.  “Naples was great because people loved to have their picture taken,” Burckhardt explains, “and then they'd say, ‘Would you send me a photograph?’  At that time, you didn't develop them overnight.  So I said, ‘Sure I will,’ and I intended to.  I wrote down their address maybe.  But then I never did, and I'm sure they forgot too, the next day.  It was just part of the whole show that you put on.”    Burckhardt loved that show, the bursts of expression so different from the cool reserve with which he had grown up.  His Naples photographs are on a par with his New York photographs as a portrait of a city, reacting to the spontaneous emotion which is central to the Neapolitan character.
            In the mid-1950s, Burckhardt began spending summers in Maine -- first at Deer Isle, on an isolated coast which has since become a popular tourist stop, and later inland near the farmhouse he bought in Searsmont in 1965.  His first essays in photographing the countryside date from these days, and nature’s varied wealth has occupied him ever since.  His photographic and film treatments of woods, lakes, coastlines, and fields would later propel him into surprising discoveries in painting.
            The 1960s represented an ever-burgeoning world -- not just for Burckhardt but for the New York artworld as a whole, which was expanding at an astronomical rate.  More and more artists were coming to New York, being shown, and making money.  While he saw less of old friends like de Kooning, Burckhardt was always befriending and being befriended by succeeding generations.  In the 1950s, it had been the New York School of poets -- John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler -- along with painters Jane Freilicher, Alex Katz, and Larry Rivers.  Now, Burckhardt made films with Red Grooms and Mimi Gross (then husband and wife), and with Andy Warhol superstar Taylor Mead.  He also had an instant rapport with the next generation of poets -- particularly Ron Padgett and Anne Waldman.  In the 1960s, Burckhardt’s films, which had had an oblique relationship with experimental trends of the 1950s, suddenly made perfect sense.  As Burckhardt himself explains, “Then came the hippie, anti-Hollywood, pro-sex, revolution, of which I became a fellow traveler and beneficiary.  My films were shown more often.”
            By 1961, he had separated from Edith, and, as he puts it, “I turned fifty, was divorced, married Yvonne Jacquette from Pittsburgh, Pa., Thomas was born -- all this within one month in 1964.”   While he did not photograph so often in the 1960s, his film production continued to soar, with 13 films in the 1960s, 22 films in the 1970s, 21 films in the 1980s, and 11 so far in the 1990s.  He also picked up his photographic output in the 1970s and has been prolific since that time.
            Burckhardt shared his friend Edwin Denby’s love of dance, particularly the choreographies of George Balanchine, which Denby, in his role as dance critic for The New York Herald Tribune, consistently championed.  The pair became avid followers of new developments in dance, as they were of all the arts.  Burckhardt has often collaborated with dancers in his films, among them Yoshiko Chuma, Douglas Dunn, Dana Reitz, and Paul Taylor. 
            Burckhardt’s friends were more in the worlds of painting, poetry, and dance, than they were in photography or film, and his work shows those influences.  Instead of exhibiting the pyrotechnics or loaded formalism most often associated with art photography, he has chosen to make evocative, multiple-layered, images.  He has collaborated with poets in books and films, including Mediterranean Cities, with sonnets by Denby, which came out in 1956.  Ashbery has called Burckhardt “a subterranean monument.”  In recent years, Burckhardt has started to receive recognition beyond his inner circle of creative associates.  The new attention has focused largely on an unexpected area, his painting.  As we have seen, he always had an interest in painting.  Indeed, he exhibited paintings frequently in the 1970s and 1980s.  It wasn’t until the 1990s, however, at the age of 80, that he suddenly made a breakthrough, surprising even his longtime supporters with the freshness of his vision.
            In the 1990s, Burckhardt has risen to inspiring heights, providing a model of how an artist can continue to change and grow.  Today, in his mid-eighties, he produces photographs, films, paintings, and collages, always as though he is seeing something for the first time.  His most recent film, Remembering Edwin Denby is an homage to his great friend, who died in 1983.  Burckhardt works assiduously, as part of a daily practice.  He is constantly alert to new possibilities.  His attitude towards creativity is one of liberation from rules and established patterns of behavior, while at the same time it is not dismissive or iconoclastic of traditions.  He is as open to the brand new as he is to the ancient.  Burckhardt’s primary tendency is to Classicism, where visual proportion is symbolic of a world in balance.  Burckhardt has proved that art is a daily enterprise.  It has little to do with what one has done before.  Burckhardt once modified the adage “Ars longa, vita brevis” to read “Ars brevis, vita longa.”  Perhaps we could add to that “Ars longa, vita longa.” 

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