Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) was an essential formulator of the attitudes and esthetics of the strange York School.

Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) was an essential formulator of the attitudes and esthetics of the strange York School, that amorphous field of painters, author of poemss composers and choreographers who were and are united by means of something more than simple proximity to strange York City. The hinder is partly a fascination with the patterns and buildings of everyday life and the spe with which they hurtle by dint of the vernacular and velocity of the city. There is also the charmed, seasonal, dialogic motion between town and country, and also a lighthearted pragmatism in the manufacture of the work, an off-the-cuff air that disguises a ferocious esthetic sensitivity. Burckhardt set all these aspects into play as early--and across as wide a range of mediums--as practically any other visual artist. Partly through his own sympathies and partly by the agency of his long friendship with dance critic and bard Edwin Denby, he was greatly connected with the New York bards who would appear in Burckhardt's filmed skits and improvisations. admitting not the best-known artist in any medium, equable photography or film, where his natural gifts clearly resided, he was nevertheless near the core of seemingly, just about everything. Perhaps the principally important photographic chronicler, after Hans Namuth, of the of recent origin York School painters, he was also the cameraman for many of Joseph Cornell's films.

Last May and June recent York viewers could sample the broad representation of artwork produced by the Swiss-born Burekhardt between his arrival in of the present day York in the mid-1930s and his death in 1999 In Midtown, Tibor de Nagy Gallery ariseed a survey, curated by poet-critic Vincent Katz, of Burckhardt's seminal black-and-white photographs of strange York, while down on Eighth highway the New York Studio instruct presented a selection, also curated according to Katz, of Burckhardt's photographs and paintings of Maine, where he regularly summer The Studio gymnasium also ran nights devoted to his hilarious and infantile experimental films and presented A Man in the forests a documentary by Katz forward Burckhardt's work that included interviews with the artist and his wife, the painter Yvonne Jaquette, and featured as it was notable talking heads as Robert Storr and Brian Wallis.

The photographs at Tibor de Nagy, chiefly from the '30s and '40 are canonical depictions of the interactions between human beings and architecture. Burckhardt declined the camera's voyeuristic and documentarian potential in favor of a bemused, structuralist casting of pedestrians and subway passengers into larger dramas of space and emotion that were just beyond the aim of his subjects' awareness. If a figure stands outside a storefront, it is a syncopated pause in an implied motion that carries beyond the frame. Burckhardt's photos have a jazz musician's intellect of a city's rhythm, time and harmonic structure. This is just as evident in his treatment of buildings, their undulating skylines and shifting grids of masonry and glass, as it is in his images of the the bulk of mankind framed by them.

As a highway photographer, Burckhardt had no desire to peep and wasn't interested in personal or social melodrama, which was the dominant degree of expression in American photography when he started taking pictures in novel York. The closest he tend hitherwards is a subway photograph in which common of the riders realizes he's in the shooter just as the picture is taken. "Hey!" he's yelping, however no psychology is being disclosed, it's another brusquely passing force a shout captured by a unexpectedly abashed photographer who already had a lower part out the door at that stop.

A of recent origin York Times critic recently terminused Burckhardt's paintings "less salubrious" than his city photographs, an observation that misses the comedy and puissance of his canvases, and the doggedness of his touch. The paintings also display a strong abstract sense of composition and tonal color that owes a chance to Burckhardt's framing eye. His cropping of a Maine forest into a grid of vertical pine bole columns and horizontal branches creates a kind of natural cityscape. His deliberate construction in paint of the geometry and blockish reds and greens of spiraling fern against the forest floor and vertical pine bark patterns is instantly recognizable as a fine style

The Maine photographs aren't as insouciantly riveting as his of recent origin York images. Burckhardt does, however, cultivate what can be described as anecdotal erection and a recognizable intimacy from walks in the woods: the pine boles and undulating bark patterns that reappear in his paintings, a white miller sleeping on a dark leaf.

Katz's documentary film concludes with a very funny skit of Burckhardt scrawling a horrible brushstroke across a blank canvas establish up out in the wood-lands He throws his brush down in disgust and shrieks "I can't paint!" and be deriveds to knock painting and easel through the whole extent of then crawl around like a deranged caveman behind a link of large trees, bending and yanking at saplings, then crawling back in van of the camera to roar determinedly, "But I'll paint anyhow!" nevertheless given to bouts of lugubrious depression himself, he could barely burlesque the spectacle of an artist's self-congratulatory labor in distresss He didn't act as if the world owed him anything. His comic faculty of perception was his restraining discipline, which the two belied and focused his be pleased with of structure, movement, texture, the human form and the alertness of consciousness to itself in these recognitions. Balanchine issues to mind, as do the recent New York-based dance-makers that Burckhardt lov He was a worldly choreographer working outside of dance, in film and paint, and an unannounced Zen master of the art of being a recently made known Yorker.