Herbert Matter at Staley-Wise - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Photography, unlike other visual arts, proffers a decent livelihood to those of its practitioners willing to accept paid assignments, and for a like reason the history of photography is confine up with several kinds of system of exchanges In the instance of Herbert Matter (1907-1984) who immigrated from Switzerland to novel York in 1936, magazine work, special commissions and teaching at Yale allowed him to hunt photography at least part-time as an art. Should he have starved in a garret instead? Maybe not. Looking at the 40-odd works in this present to view you got the sense that he probably wouldn't have done as well.

Production values enumerate as one of the main attractions of these photographs: German cameras, serviceable lighting, exotic settings and quality darkroom equipment all collaborated in their confection--nothing a garret-dweller could bankroll. upon the other hand, originality doesn't present the appearance to have been all that important to Matter. He borrowed right and left from other artists, decades before the advent of "appropriation art." The strange thing is that he takes les from comrade photographers than from painters--Statue Masked (ca. 1940) for example, is an unembarrassed theft, not from, say, Atget, on the other hand from de Chirico. Matter's freshest work is "painterly" and nonfigurative, like Abstraction Ill (ca. 1945) a high-contrast black-and-white image that plays with positive-negative ambiguity as well as 1940 biomorphism. Part of the interest advances from viewer speculation (doomed to fail) upon how Matter used photographic proces to arrive at the weird tissues-on-a-microscope-slide imagery of the work. Meanwhile, Driftwood Abstraction (ca. 1945) direct the eyes like Tanguy in translation: the driftwood is just barely identifiable, on the other hand it hangs meltingly in a certain quantity of unmeasurable gray, surrealist space.

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Matter gave up immaculate abstraction pretty quickly, probably because he realized that it goe against the natural grain of the photographic medium. And still abstraction returns in subjects like Apple Tree in Snow (ca. 1970) where a tangle of high-contrast bare branches against a whited-out background, more pattern than full fleshed-out tree, reminds one of Pollock Other pictures have a fashion mag flavor--Calder and his wife in a stony novel England orchard, Giacometti in a haze of cigarette sooty vapor a "Brazilian House" of sugary cover with stucco in pearly light. What's not to like? Nothing. greatest in quantity of the pictures are attractive--even if they don't change in what manner we see or think.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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