"Untitled" (1990) by Robert Bergman
In an unusual choice, New York’s PS1 Museum is exhibiting a solo show called “Selected Portraits” by the American photographer Robert Bergman. A virtually unknown figure to the art world, Bergman launched his début this fall in two major museums. Robert Bergman: Portraits, 1986-95 is on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., an institution as known for its conservative prestige as PS1 for its offbeat experimentalism.
Recognition has been long in coming for Bergman, now 65. His biography reads like the ultimate eleventh hour success story, extolling that hoary fable of patience and reward. With an art world that increasingly caters to ideals of the young and trendy, Bergman’s breakthrough attracted a wave of media attention. In its promotion of emerging creative practices, P.S.1 has rarely endorsed so ancient a mariner. Seasoned is now fresh.
The man who inspired Bergman to pick up his camera did not have to wait as long. Robert Frank, who has became a household name, obtained recognition with comparative ease after publishing “the Americans” in 1958. Though initially controversial, it quickly took hold as a seminal work. Within two years, Frank received a solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago and a second one at the Museum of Modern Art. The Americans is now on a celebratory exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and will be there until January.
"Trolley - New Orleans" (1955) from "The Americans" by Robert Frank
Startlingly, Bergman’s practice shares many points in common with that of Frank when he made “the Americans”. The younger photographer unmistakably emulated the spirit of his mentor in that project, consequently producing the colored human portraits he has so far exhibited. “Selected Portraits ” distinctly resembles “the Americans” both in ambition and subject. Bergman claims he learned from Robert Frank that “the artist had to have a personal vision through feeling and intuition.”
"Untitled" (1993) by Robert Bergman
With striking parallels Bergman set out in the mid eighties to photograph the people of America. He toured the States on extensive road trips (a la Frank). He carried around a portable 35mm (a la Frank). He worked with natural lighting (a la Frank). His photographed subjects were randomly encountered with no class or racial bias (a la Frank). He took thousands of pictures and printed mere dozens (a la Frank). He aspired to capture the spiritual essence of a nation (also a la Frank)… What is truly surprising is the totally distinct vision he actually produced.
One gets the sense, looking at Bergman’s two-dozen large-scale colorful C-prints, that his is a sensibility as diametrically opposed to that of “the Americans” as you can get. While both photographers ostensibly worked in “portraiture”, they interpreted the idea very differently.
Frank has the montage intelligence of a latent filmmaker. Not only did “the Americans” function as a sequence of interrelated images, drawing on such cinematic devices as visual analogy, juxtaposition, synecdoche etc., he packed each individual photograph with intricate visual relationships. As indebted to Sergi Eisenstein as Walker Evans, Robert Frank’s great subject is not the American people, but the space between them and around them. His pictures even begin to address the activity of photography and its politics. “The Americans” contains a cunningly composed visual critique of America’s self-representation. The word “portrait” can be applied here only in a loose sense.
from "The Americans" by Robert Frank
Bergman’s photography on the other hand, references portraiture in the painterly tradition. It ought to surprise no one that these found their greatest advocate in the late Meyer Shapiro, eminent art historian of post impressionist paintings. The language of painting reigns supreme in these faces. Some bear strong likeness to period portraitures, from the facial types to painterly palette. Bergman has a very studied style, employing vibrant colors, delicate textures, and dramatic lighting. Though roadside pickups, his models look like studio sitters, decontextualized completely from their environments before solid backdrops.
Faces predominate in these tightly cropped compositions; they tends to be large, abject, and filling the frame. Jalal Toufic writes in “One or Two Things I’m Dying to Tell You” that the image of a face always inspires pity in its viewer, and any face unprotected by perfect beauty is at once vulnerable and piteous. He thus attributed to the “saving face” impulse a wider application. Affirming this insight, Bergman’s faces inspire instinctive sympathy from their viewers. The immediacy of certain faces in this show exudes pathos, naked and askew, unshielded by either pigment or symbols.
The difference in artistic expression between Frank and Bergman is a reflection of their difference in politics and personal backgrounds. At the time of his Guggenheim fellowship, Robert Frank was a European Jew harboring socialist sympathies. His identity as a non-American outsider enabled him to launch a scathing critique of American social injustices and economical inequalities. Bergman, however, channeled the 1980s apolitical attitude into his own art making, at times coming close to escapism.
Bergman unfolded a vision of America every bit as downtrodden as that of Robert Frank, but passive and silent. These “eloquent” faces have little to say. Rejecting language, Bergman wants the viewer to lose himself instead in an unspoiled encounter with the pure image. One suspects that painting is summoned precisely in order to suppress photography’s peculiar specificity. Even titles are pared down to eliminate information: just the year. No names, no places.
“I don’t want you to have any escape from simply reacting to the art,” says Bergman, “Telling the location sets up false assumptions.” Often, his ideas on art seem dated to a pre-postmodern era.
Considering the cultural backlash against essentialism and universalities, it is hardly astonishing that Bergman’s practice has been so often passed over. As he observed himself, “my art is not fashionable.” More accurately, his art is not in keeping with the times. The overwhelming feeling of “Selected Portraits” is isolation. Its message is a pathetic plea of the image.
Now simultaneously on view in New York City, “Selected Portraits” and “the Americans” present another opportunity to evaluate deserts and recognitions. Robert Frank made the right kind of work at the right time, down to predicting a civil rights movement ten years beforehand. The better question for Robert Bergman is not why he has been obscure but rather why discover him today?
One Comment
These otherwise intelligent comments on the work of Robert Bergman and Robert Frank completely fall down when addressing the politics of Bergman’s portraits. Bergman’s portraits capture precisely the transcendent universality of our yearning common humanity that is manifested in the particularity of each of our faces—a universal longing for authentic recognition that is repeatedly deflected in the evasive artificial self-representations that covers the surface of the contemporary social landscape and that consigns us to a life of spiritual isolation and suffering. This artificial landscape presents itself as if it were real and through this deception creates a seemingly impenetrable world of social alienation that we must find a way to break through, through a kind of collective spiritual action.
This suffering and longing that Bergman makes manifest is an effect of collective flight, an evasion of the Other that has been made worse by the post-modernism that the writer valorizes. Infected by the very Fear of the Other that is at the heart of the problem of alienation itself, post-modernism employs anti-essentialism, irony and the rejection of meaning to create an aesthetic that disallows affirmation of the truth of human presence, when it is only by re-encountering our Presence as a moral truth, an evocative call haunting our every encounter, that we can right ourselves and reawaken an authentic movement for social transformation. Far from being out of step with the times, that moral call is the prophetic and radical political meaning of Bergman’s art.
And far from being Frank’s political opposite, I would say Bergman takes Frank’s insight into America’s truth to a still more profound level. In this sense, what Kerouac said of Frank could also be said of Bergman’s portraits: “…he’s sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.”