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.

White Moth on Leaf, 1970s gelatin silver print, 10 x 13 inches Estate of Rudy Burckhardt, courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York

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 GymnopŽdies.

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."

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 AmadŽe 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."