Rudy Burckhardt in town & country: as a recent exhibition and documentary film suggest, this deceptively nonchalant painter-photographer-filmmaker was equally inspired by New York City and rural Maine

Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) was an essential formulator of the attitudes and esthetics of the fresh York School, that amorphous field of painters, author of poemss composers and choreographers who were and are united by means of something more than simple proximity to of recent origin York City. The hinder is partly a fascination with the patterns and manner of makings of everyday life and the spe with which they hurtle by the agency of the vernacular and velocity of the city. There is also the charmed, seasonal, dialogic move between town and country, and also a lighthearted pragmatism in the manufacture of the work, an off-the-cuff air that disguises a ferocious esthetic sensitivity. Burckhardt set all these aspects into play as early--and across as wide a range of mediums--as practically any other visual artist. Partly by means of his own sympathies and partly end his long friendship with dance critic and author of poems Edwin Denby, he was far down connected with the New York author of poemss who would appear in Burckhardt's filmed skits and improvisations. notwithstanding that not the best-known artist in any medium, level photography or film, where his natural gifts clearly resided, he was nevertheless near the core of seemingly, just about everything. Perhaps the greatest in quantity important photographic chronicler, after Hans Namuth, of the of recent origin York School painters, he was also the cameraman for many of Joseph Cornell's films.

Last May and June of recent origin York viewers could sample the broad appearance of artwork produced by the Swiss-born Burekhardt between his arrival in of recent origin York in the mid-1930s and his death in 1999 In Midtown, Tibor de Nagy Gallery high hilled a survey, curated by poet-critic Vincent Katz, of Burckhardt's seminal black-and-white photographs of of recent origin York, while down on Eighth highway the New York Studio seminary presented a selection, also curated by means of Katz, of Burckhardt's photographs and paintings of Maine, where he regularly summer The Studio gymnasium also ran nights devoted to his hilarious and delicate experimental films and presented A Man in the forest-lands a documentary by Katz upon Burckhardt's work that included interviews with the artist and his wife, the painter Yvonne Jaquette, and featured like notable talking heads as Robert Storr and Brian Wallis.

The photographs at Tibor de Nagy, for the greatest part from the '30s and '40 are canonical depictions of the interactions between human beings and architecture. Burckhardt declined the camera's voyeuristic and documentarian potential in favor of a bemused, structuralist casting of pedestrians and subway passengers into larger dramas of space and change that were just beyond the purpose of his subjects' awareness. If a figure stands outside a storefront, it is a syncopated pause in an implied move that carries beyond the frame. Burckhardt's photos have a jazz musician's faculty of perception of a city's rhythm, degree of movement and harmonic structure. This is just as evident in his treatment of buildings, their undulating skylines and shifting grids of masonry and glass, as it is in his images of the family framed by them.

As a road photographer, Burckhardt had no desire to search and wasn't interested in personal or social melodrama, which was the dominant manner of expression in American photography when he started taking pictures in fresh York. The closest he approachs is a subway photograph in which single of the riders realizes he's in the discharge just as the picture is taken. "Hey!" he's yelping, on the contrary no psychology is being disclosed, it's another brusquely passing jiffy a shout captured by a unexpectedly abashed photographer who already had a paw out the door at that stop.

A fresh York Times critic recently confineed Burckhardt's paintings "less salubrious" than his city photographs, an observation that misses the comedy and nerve of his canvases, and the doggedness of his touch. The paintings also display a positive abstract sense of composition and tonal color that owes a doom to Burckhardt's framing eye. His cropping of a Maine forest into a grid of vertical pine stem columns and horizontal branches creates a kind of natural cityscape. His deliberate construction in paint of the geometry and blockish reds and greens of spiraling fern against the forest floor and vertical pine bark patterns is instantly recognizable as a fine style

The Maine photographs aren't as insouciantly riveting as his novel York images. Burckhardt does, however, cultivate what can be described as anecdotal mode of building and a recognizable intimacy from walks in the woods: the pine stalks and undulating bark patterns that reappear in his paintings, a white miller sleeping on a dark leaf.

Katz's documentary film shuts with a very funny skit of Burckhardt scrawling a horrible brushstroke across a blank canvas plant up out in the wood-lands He throws his brush down in disgust and screams "I can't paint!" and go aheads to knock painting and easel above then crawl around like a deranged caveman behind a two of large trees, bending and yanking at saplings, then crawling back in brow of the camera to exclaim determinedly, "But I'll paint anyhow!" although given to bouts of lamentable depression himself, he could alone burlesque the spectacle of an artist's self-congratulatory exert one's selfs He didn't act as if the world owed him anything. His comic faculty of perception was his restraining discipline, which the pair belied and focused his have affection for of structure, movement, texture, the human form and the alertness of consciousness to itself in these recognitions. Balanchine tend hitherwards to mind, as do the new New York-based dance-makers that Burckhardt lov He was a worldly choreographer working outside of dance, in film and paint, and an unannounced Zen master of the art of being a fresh Yorker.