Avedon in SFMOMA: Baring the Soul

‘Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004’ became the third hit show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this summer, following the Georgia O’Keeffe/Ansel Adams and Robert Frank major exhibitions already on display.
Notorious for its special attention to the art of photography from the get go SFMOMA became the only venue in the United States for this largest retrospective since Avedon’s death in 2004.
Among the very recent presentations at the San Francisco venue there were William Eggleston, Martin Munkacsi, Lee Miller, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Jeff Wall, and other big names of contemporary art, each with his/her own skillful degree of penetrating the human soul. What is strikingly Avedon – his meticulously positioned naked models (like in “Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory”) are not as bare as the eyes of the people he chooses for his legendary portraiture. Be it composer Igor Stravinsky, writer Truman Capote, actor Groucho Marx, the Duke of Windsor, or a drifter found along Interstate 80 in Sparks, Nevada, each of Avedon’s portraits comes across as one most important moment in an individual life, caught on film by a stroke of luck (or a genius). Technically speaking, in this day and time of airbrushed matte celebrity cheeks and digitally (if not surgically) enhanced cleavages it is rather refreshing to see human faces and bodies just as they are – warts, freckles and all – fascinating regardless of the status of their owners. A masterpiece of still imagery – Marilyn Monroe in a sequenced halter-top has a wandering gaze and trembling lips, as if her fate has been written on the wall in front of her. Robert Frank, softened by the presence of a dog whose chin he scratches while posing, raises his deep dark eyes for the camera with an unusual expression of vulnerable calm in them. Two portraits – of a murderer Dick Hickock and his father Walter Hickock venture right into the invisible world of human genome brought to light by the laser-sharp artist’s vision. Artists Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein, playwrights Tennessee Williams and Jean Genet, musicians Bob Dylan and the Beatles pose for Avedon in the same participatory manner as do a coal miner, a trucker, a farmer, and a 13-year-old rattle snake skinner from Texas, where the artist was working on a commission to create images of the working people of the American West. Stark white backdrop and black traces of the film frame in his staged portraits add to the feeling of a created environment, a studio shot, an artificially constructed “posing” mode, however, as we now know, the photographer had his own bag of tricks to make his models display those facial expressions he envisioned for them and required from them. A great number of Avedon’s famous fashion shots that put the world of haute couture and its static models into motion opens the show, setting the mood for a flight of fancy. Those are the stories of human struggle, emotions, and the fleeting moments of life written upon the many faces that are fanciful and endlessly engaging. The show runs through November 29 at 151 Third Street, SF. More information at www.sfmoma.org. Images: Richard Avedon, Marilyn Monroe, actor, New York, May 6, 1957; Boyd Fortin, thirteen year old rattle snake skinner, Sweetwater, Texas, March 10, 1979. The Richard Avedon Foundation.