More than 40 years elapsed before Chicago lensman Nathan Lerner exhibited any of the photographs he had consistently been taking, but once he began, there was a steady stream of solo shows, culminating in the large posthumous survey currently at the State of Illinois Art Gallery.
That, like Lerner’s half-century retrospective at the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center (l984), presents both documentary and experimental work, in color as well as black and white.
However, as a memorial — Lerner died at age 83 last February — the present exhibition inevitably sums up the subject’s photographic career more completely than earlier efforts, presenting it not only with a sense of wholeness but also a satisfying balance.
This is to the credit of Lerner’s widow, Kiyoko, who selected the pictures and supervised their hanging, thereby becoming an exception to the legion of artists’ spouses who have propagated distortions and aggrandizements in the name of love.
Where it would have been easy, even natural, to project the organizer’s feeling through annotation or arrangement, the show memorializes Lerner by adding nothing extraneous to the images and revealing only the emotion inherent in the pictures themselves.
Such coolness works well with Lerner insofar as his earliest photographs, taken during the Great Depression, tend to pluck one’s heartstrings on their own, in ways that the sterner images of the period by, say, Walker Evans do not.
Lerner’s humanism is a matter of feeling over form, and especially in relation to Evans, it can look idealizing and sentimental. This vein continued throughout Lerner’s representational output, ultimately being withheld from bathos by greater formal rigor.
Lerner developed the strength through more experimental work created at the New Bauhaus, and it’s for these images that he is best remembered and most admired.
His light-box pictures, reflections, superimpositions and drawings with light were especially important to the history of the medium. But side-by-side with them existed a deeper, warmer impulse that Lerner exercised in parallel, even through late color prints made in Japan since 1971.
He liked to say: “Once I refined the techniques, the subject matter again became more important.” And Lerner’s most enduring subject matter always involved people, either directly or by implication. So the threat of overdone sentiment came to the fore of his work yet again. But this time Lerner restrained it more successfully through the increased rigor of his formal designs.
No doubt an involvement with Japanese culture, which is of course itself noted for restraint, played a big part in Lerner’s enterprise, for even the largest and brightest of the color prints on view generally escape garishness and easy feeling.
Favorite motifs, such as disembodied eyes, still recur but are simplified and, one wants to say, liberated from their earthly associations with iron fences and shop signs.
Is it too much to suggest that late in life Lerner purified his art? Not according to this exhibition. Some of the final pictures are virtually of symbols or essences.
Speaking of the difference between seeing as a child and as an adult, Lerner once said, “Most of us lose the means to perceive the world and we have to learn again.”
In that sense, he was one of Chicago’s greatest and most tireless students.
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“Nathan Lerner: A Lifetime of Photographic Inquiry” continues at the State of Illinois Art Gallery, James R. Thompson Center, 100 W. Randolph St., through Aug. 15.
