[Leica] HCB exhibit and the New Yorker Review

[passaro.vince at gmail.com (Vince Passaro)]

Scheldahl is a particular reviewer, a very good one, but he favors passion
and what you might call psychological bloodletting over, say, a near perfect
mimetic and compositional skill. HCB took reality and revealed its deepest
REALITY -- while also revealing -- and indeed BY also revealing -- its
hidden forms. He comes off, undeniably, as cool and distant from what he
"composes" -- as opposed, say, to Eugene Smith, whose passionate engagement
speaks loudly in his photographs.  So Schjeldahl is right in a way, except
in his personal sense that such a vision as HCB's "numbs" the heart. I think
for many of us the formal beauty that he discovers and reveals in a moment,
a scene, an image of reality breaks the heart wide open, in the way, say,
that the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins' could quite literally feel divine
creative reality in a mont in nature, seeing a falcon or a dawn -- "The
world is charged with the grandeur of God! It will flame out--" etc.

Vince

On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 11:18 AM, Charcot <charcot at comcast.net> wrote:

> ?He traveled all over the goddamned world, and you never felt that he was
> moved by something that was happening other than the beauty of it, or just
> the composition.? The problem of Cartier-Bresson?s art is the conjunction 
> of
> aesthetic classicism and journalistic protocol: timeless truth and breaking
> news. He rendered a world that, set forth at MOMA by the museum?s chief
> curator of photography, Peter Galassi, richly satisfies the eye and the
> mind, while numbing the heart.
>
> Read more:
> http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/artworld/2010/04/19/100419craw_artworld_schjeldahl#ixzz0lN2EKWEc
>
> Sorry folks I don't get it - how does the reviewer draw all this from HCB .
>  I for one am planning on spending $ to go to one of the hosting cities!
>
> ernie
>
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