NEW YORK — It makes perfect sense that someone who’d changed the face of an art form would then want to keep changing his own approach to that art form. Once Everest has been climbed, why climb it again (which begs an even harder question, how to climb it again)?
Robert Frank changed the face of photography with his 1958 book, “The Americans.” And changing his own approach to photography is what he kept doing over the next 60 years of his life. To his way of thinking, there wasn’t an alternative. “Once we make a choice, it’s fate,” he said. “First thought, best thought. We don’t go back. We only move forward.”
“Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue” takes as its subject Frank’s elusive, mercurial, forthrightly ad hoc relationship to image-making post-“Americans.” The show runs at the Museum of Modern Art through Jan. 11. Like that relationship, the show is inescapably unsatisfying and incomplete. So what? So’s life. More important, it’s consistently surprising and abundantly interesting.
That verb in the title, “dances,” is just right: The show refuses to stay in any one place. There are more than 200 items on display: photographs, of course, as well as photographic collages, contact sheets, and photo albums. Filmmaking was Frank’s primary interest in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and clips from many of the films play on monitors throughout the show. The exhibition takes its title from a 30-minute film Frank made in 1980.
There are also letters, books, vintage magazines, drawings and paintings by his second wife, June Leaf, maquettes, two Frank-directed music videos (for New Order and Patti Smith), and album covers — for the New Lost City Ramblers, his friend Allen Ginsberg, Tom Waits, and one for the Rolling Stones that’s recognizable to millions more people than have ever heard of Robert Frank: “Exile on Main St.”
Despite what they want you to think, the Rolling Stones aren’t necessarily the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band. They are the art world’s greatest rock ‘n’ patrons: Andy Warhol did the cover of “Sticky Fingers” (yes, the zipper), and Frank did the artwork for “Exile.” He also made a long-suppressed documentary about the band’s 1972 US tour (suppressed by the Stones — patronage has its limits). There are stills from it in the show.
This is Frank’s centenary, and MoMA is not alone in observing it. Earlier this year, there was “Robert Frank and Todd Webb: Across America, 1955,” at the Addison Gallery of American Art. “Robert Frank — Be Happy” is at the Museum Folkwang, in Essen, Germany, through Jan. 5. Another Frank show, “Hope Makes Visions,” is at New York’s Pace Gallery through Dec. 21. That same date, “Robert Frank: Mary’s Book” opens at the Museum of Fine Arts. Aperture has published a new edition of “The Americans.”
Even all these years later, the book remains thrilling: filled with wary awe and a sense of irreducible discovery. It retains a wayward, offhand energy so tightly leashed it seems about to explode off the page. In his introduction, Frank’s friend Jack Kerouac called “The Americans” “a sad poem.” Cumulatively, its 83 images (edited down from nearly 28,000 exposures) are an epic poem. Whether or not it’s sad, depends on how you respond to highways and flags and jukeboxes and televisions and race relations and the emptiness of American space.
The post-“Americans” work — whether in photography or film — retains a poetic quality. If anything, that quality deepens. But the poetry has undergone a transformation, shifting from epic to lyric. The images are often indwelling and meditative, not sweeping and gestural. Part of the excitement of “The Americans” is how exploratory it feels: artistically no less than geographically. What we see throughout “Life Dances On” remains exploratory, but the explorations stay close to home: confidently uncertain, proudly unassertive. “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside,” Frank said in 1985.
“The Americans” is a book of quite-literal revelations: the way a continent-sized country looked to a man who’d spent the first two-thirds of his life in Switzerland. The subsequent work is about revelations waited for rather than pursued: not the kind of revelations that one can seek out — let alone by traveling 9,000 miles in a used Ford coupe — the kind one has to hope for, not certain they’ll come. The representative title from these years may belong to Frank’s book “The Lines of My Hand” (1972). Emotionally, conceptually, even personally, so much of the work during these decades is up close, as close as, yes, the lines of Frank’s hand.
In 1970, Frank and Leaf bought a house in Mabou, halfway up the western coast of Cape Breton Island. They found what he described as “a completely different rhythm of life.” The terrain is windswept, stark, almost severe. You can see all that in the photos and footage from Mabou. More to the point, you can feel those qualities — the rhythm, too. Frank’s work becomes increasingly centripetal (even hermetic), provisional, inchoate, oblique. He turns to visual devices like layering and juxtaposition. Words, as both subject matter and device, interest him. He inscribes them on negatives. He writes them on prints. He relishes what Ginsberg, in a slightly different context, called “roughness, scratchiness, and accident.”
In a 1989 letter to the photography historian William Johnson, Frank wrote, “Now — I still want more. Not fame — not money. Just more.” Then there’s a new paragraph, as if to draw away from so grand-sounding an assertion: “So far there is more snow.” Can you tell he wrote it in Mabou?
Photography is fundamentally about two things: light and those elements of the external world that that light enables a camera to capture. As he aged, Frank was drawn to darkness (not literal darkness, but darkness as doubt and consternation) and the claims of inwardness. Both of his children died: Andrea, only 20, in a plane crash; and Pablo, two decades later, by suicide. Changing the face of a medium is an extraordinary thing, and Frank’s accomplishment had become well acknowledged. But what solace can that offer someone forced to endure the most awful curse life has to offer, to outlive one’s children?
“External life being so mighty,” Saul Bellow writes in “The Adventures of Augie March,” “the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances.” Stand before and, if he has a camera, record them. The appearances of internal life can be even more terrible, though, and much of Frank’s late work is grounded in a recognition of that.
“Life Dances On” has a small companion exhibition, “Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage.” Showing on eight screens on MoMA’s ground floor and in the basement, it’s as announced: footage that’s … scrappy. It ranges in date from 1970 to 2006. Some is in color, some is in black-and-white. Much, though not all, is in the way of being home movies: Leaf eating what looks like a chicken pot pie, a brief view of Pablo, Frank visiting his parents in Switzerland and taking the ferry to Nova Scotia. There are visits to Beirut, in 1991; Russia, in 1999; and Egypt, undated.
The title comes from a remark Frank made about his filmmaking. “It starts out as ‘scrapbook footage.’ There is no script, there is plenty of intuition.” Or, construed more broadly and put another way, life dances on.
MoMA is also presenting a retrospective of “The Complete Robert Frank: Films and Videos, 1959–2017” through Dec. 11.
LIFE DANCES ON: Robert Frank in Dialogue
ROBERT FRANK’S SCRAPBOOK FOOTAGE
At Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., New York, through Jan. 11 and March, respectively. 212-708-9400, moma.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at [email protected].
This post was originally published on here
