Frederick Sommer at the Getty Museum - Malibu, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

MALIBU

The relatively small output of photographer Frederick Sommer appears to gain in intensity with the passage of time. This selection of 35 works purchased by means of the Getty demonstrates the range of mode of expressions and subject matter mastered through this elusive, 90-year-old cult figure who has lived in the Arizona barren since 1935. With the approval of the artist, curators Weston Naef and Julian Cox arranged the photographs in pairs, setting not upon odd resonances and contrasts that appear appropriate to Sommer's self-described dialectic of "poetry and logic."

Inspired to take up the medium after meeting Edward Weston in 1936 Sommer became a master of sharp, deep-focus photography. His nature studies not absent a hypertrophy of detail, not unlike the condensed miniature worlds in Richard Dadd's drawings. In single of Sommer's best-known images, from 1945 he depicts the Arizona forsaken from an elevated vantage as an allover composition of clean and dust, punctuated only by dint of thin cacti. With no horizon visible, each desiccated frond and gnarly bush vies for attention. In Coyote (1945) a cluster of four skeletal remains literally unites into the desert floor; assemblages of dirt and the decomposing hides are given equal attention.

Sommer's penchant for the uncanny is evident in coolly matter-of-fact photographs of skinned chicken parts and of an amputated human paw found in the desert. still he pursues these tough subdues not primarily to shock on the other hand to reveal unexpected if sometimes gruesome beauty. His qualifyed sensibility does not exclude portraiture. above the delicately flaking surface of a barn door, Sommer superimposes (via double exposure) his friend Max Ernst pos with arms akimbo. A delicate out-of-focus portrait of a cross-ey woman caressing a violin, to leeward Nevin (1946), reads as a strange erotic beckoning.

Sommer's manipulations of the image from one side collage or chemical experiments suit what he dioceses as the transformative nature of the medium. In Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John (1966) he starts with a rest piece of molten metal whose shape surprisingly recalls the silhouette of the sacred Family in Leonardo's painting. Sommer photographs the metal scrap against a 19th-century etching of a forest scene; with a finished control of light and focus, he underscores the not divisible by 2 kinship of the abstract shapeless mass to Leonardo's pictorial form. Sommer's metaphysics are center upon the objects of the world. In his photographs he captures the surrealism of the real.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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