A little more than a decade ago, Americans began to realize they had overlooked many important achievements in 20th-Century European art.
This oversight occurred largely because of the idea of cultural superiority that developed after World War II, when the art capital of the world moved from Paris to New York.
But the seeds already were present in the jingoism of the 1930s, when a lot of effort went toward defining and promoting American arts.
A particularly clear example took place in photography, as historians Beaumont and Nancy Newhall put their weight behind the pure approach of the American photographers known as Group f64. The Newhalls felt that most tributaries flowed into this one great stream, and those that didn`t were of minor import.
The consequence was a restricted view of art history that held sway for nearly 40 years. In fact, not until the ”photography boom” of the 1970s-which, being commercial, thrived on product-did Americans rediscover a variety of approaches and, by extension, the masters who practiced them in Europe.
Czech photographer Josef Sudek (1896-1976) is an extreme case, having received his first American exhibition in 1971, at age 75. But since then, he has had no fewer than four traveling retrospectives, the most recent now on show at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The exhibition is called ”The Magic Garden of Josef Sudek,” which in a way indicates how far we have come, freely acknowledging that a camera can be an instrument of magic as well as a recorder of fact.
Sudek made no such claim, though he undoubtedly believed it, having admitted he was a romantic. He was, however, an unusually practical romantic, choosing as his first profession bookbinding, because, as he said, books were expensive and he liked to read.
World War I interrupted his apprenticeship, and Sudek went to the Italian front, where he sustained a serious injury, eventually losing his right arm. After three years in hospitals, he realized he could bind books no longer and chose to become a photographer.
Sudek worked for two years in an amateur photography club before beginning study with Karel Novak at the School of Graphic Art in Prague. During this period, he embarked on the first of his many photographic series, on disabled veterans. In a practice that would become characteristic, the series occupied him for several years (1922-27).
A friend from the photo club was Jaromir Funke, with whom Sudek helped found the Czech Photographic Society in 1924. This was an organization much like the ones that sprang up at the end of the last century in Western Europe and America. It inveighed against manipulation, retouching and the use of complicated processes that gave the look of paintings or prints.
Funke`s modernist photographs perhaps were more representative of the society`s goals, as Sudek still worked in soft focus, his hazily romantic images corresponding with those taken by Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and others during their early, Pictorialist periods.
In his series on the reconstruction of St. Vitus Cathedral (1924-28), Sudek adopted a sharper focus, though his light often had so many motes in it that they still softened the image. This rich, gauzy light accounts for much of the magic in Sudek`s later pictures, as it was for him an agent of transformation.
In 1926, Sudek attended a congress of war veterans in Belgium and also went to Italy, revisiting the place where he received his wound. It was the last time he traveled; for the next 50 years he was content to live and work in Prague.
Apparently, Sudek embraced modernist esthetics only once, creating near-abstract pictures tightly focussed on sections of furniture in glass and chrome. Thereafter, he turned away from modern syntax, producing highly personal work that qualifies as a kind of emotional autobiography.
Sudek also did advertising, commercial and portrait photographs, while illustrating magazines. Here, again, was his practical side; he was not an ivory-tower artist.
Sudek preferred large-format plate cameras that he carried around the city with remarkable agility, considering his physical handicap. The preference dates from 1940, when he saw a contact print of a statue from Chartres Cathedral and, impressed by the fineness of detail, vowed never to make enlargements again.
Upon giving his images wide black borders or surrounds, he essentially completed his vocabulary. The sole modification came in 1958, when Sudek began to create landscapes with an old panoramic camera. In every format, the vision was the same, emphasizing contrasts much less than exquisitely even gradations of light.
Landscapes and still lifes were Sudek`s primary subjects; series were the means by which he explored them. In some cases, he knew the kind of light he sought came only once or twice a year, and for this he waited, returning to the scene again and again, until conditions were perfect.
Such inordinately long intervals gave his series a movement in time comparable to that of natural cycles. Always, he watched things wax and wane while communicating that he himself-man-was the most transitory.
Some pictures are surrealist in content, dark in implication, but Sudek generally responded to the world with praise, rejoicing in simple pleasures and saying, in effect, our time is so short that we must grasp everything quickly.
Music was crucial to Sudek`s attitude, and he once acknowledged that without it he would have been lost. Still, when pressed, he did not know exactly how he translated that love into his photographs. It was something deeper than simply finding the right pictorial equivalents.
The work that results in a garden also was important to Sudek, for gardens were retreats, places of contemplation, manmade aspirations to Paradise. During World War II, when he could not photograph in the streets, Sudek rarely left his own tiny garden, yet it sustained him emotionally and pictorially.
His photographs include gardens belonging to friends, the chief one being the ”magic garden” of architect Otto Rothmayer. Here the hand of man always is present, implied through, say, a hat or white-painted metal furniture. Perhaps the beauty of the pictures is clear only to another Eastern European, one who understands the premium on privacy and how freedom sometimes is felt most acutely when one is alone in the smallest of spaces.
The still lifes he made from studio clutter invariably present simple things in a way that sets them apart, making us aware they are somehow special. Often, the light surrounding them functions as a delicate halo or emanation. And at such times we feel that Sudek`s task was, like the poet Rilke`s, ”to show how happy a thing can be.”
He achieves this, remarkably, without a trace of sentimentality. In fact, his world is so consistent that he gets viewers to accept the heightened romance as a condition available to everyone. This is the sleight of hand that almost makes us forget art is a compensation for having to be human.
Of course, when set beside other photographs of the `40s and `50s, Sudek`s look more than a little reactionary, as they reflect no esthetic issues of the period. But this sense of being far from the artistic arena also is positive, for it puts the work beyond time into a purer realm. The pictures will last because they fulfill yearnings not fashionable, but eternal.
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Organized by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Socialist Republic and presented under the auspices of the Arts America program of the United States Information Agency, ”The Magic Garden of Josef Sudek” will continue in Gallery 14 of the Art Institute through Sept. 5.
