If Paris is the most painted city in the world, it is also one of the most photographed. Pioneer photographer Eugene Atget (1857-1927) was not simply one of the camera-toting multitudes, however.
His images of Paris before World War I have preserved a long-ago look and feel of the fabled city about which present generations can only wonder.
It was Paris at perhaps its most perfect, before the ravages of two wars, commercialism and modern architecture.
Manhattan`s Zabriskie Gallery, 724 Fifth Ave., is exhibiting 20 of these rare, time-traveling pictures, and for those who harbor any passion for the City of Light, they make for a most soul-fulfilling experience.
Atget`s Paris is not the typical 1920s Paris-a place of colorful street folk; noisy, uninhibited cafe life; and half-mad writers and artists.
Rather, he presents the city as a sort of sculpture garden, even in its most mundane views. His street scenes involve shops, cafes and commerce, but they seem as still and silent and timeless as that in Edward Hopper`s ”Sunday Morning.” (Hopper was a studious young painter in Paris during Atget`s time.) The war changed Atget as it did Paris. The exhibition also includes several of Atget`s later pictures, from the `20s.
In these, the sharp clarity of the early photographs is gone, replaced by suffused and dreamy images, as in his 1922 glimpse of a sculpture of a hooded figure standing among trees. There is a painful nostalgia evident here, and a sense of regret, if not remorse.
Accompanying the Atget show is a small and highly complementary exhibit of the monochromatic and painterly photographs of Gerard Traquandi, who lives and works in Marseilles.
Like Atget`s later pieces, these are quiet, subjective and contemplative images-full of a sense of meditation. He achieves his dreamlike effects in part by employing oil and gum-bichromate in his printing process.
The gallery calls the result ”sensual obfuscations.” In a recent interview, Traquandi noted, ”my work is not a return to things past but a look at them as one`s memory weakens.”
– The legendary and talented Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a sculptor and patron of the arts, maintained a large studio on Greenwich Village`s 8th Street that was headquarters for much of New York`s Bohemia in the early 20th Century.
Her Studio Club gave many young, promising artists (including Hopper)
their first one-person shows and became the first site of the Whitney Museum of American Art, since moved to the Upper East Side.
For many years, the expansive, multi-garretted building has been home to the Studio School, unique in its avoidance of the commercial applications of art and its degree program. Its teaching and study are confined to drawing, painting, sculpture and art history-in sum, to pure art.
Over the years, its faculty and visiting artists and lecturers-who sometimes seem to outnumber the students-have included such greats as Willem and Elaine deKooning, Hans Hoffman, Rudolph Arnheim, John Cage, Christo, Merce Cunningham, R. Buckminster Fuller, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, James Rosenquist and Frank Stella.
One consequently expects much of the Studio School`s students, and in their ”Projects: Winter 1991-1992” show on view this week in the school`s main gallery, 8 W. 8th St., they do not disappoint.
Some of the pieces (all 14 by 14 inches) are neophyte and crudely formed, and there`s some borrowing from the likes of Paul Cezanne, but on the whole the show is most engrossing and encouraging.
