Whitney Museum of American Art, NY
November 7, 2008 - January 25, 2009
William Eggleston, "Untitled", 1975. Dye transfer print, 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm). Cheim & Read, New York © Eggleston Artistic Trust
Critics reacted with derision when William Eggleston’s photographs first appeared at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1976. It wasn’t just the use of colour that turned them off – though until then art photography was generally confined to black and white. They simply despised Eggleston’s seeming nonchalance, his willingness to turn just about anything, from a mucky green-tiled shower stall to the grey-blue insides of an empty oven, into art. “A mess,” one detractor sneered; another dismissed his work as “erratic and ramshackle”.
It’s hard in hindsight to understand what led these writers so far astray. Looking at Eggleston’s photos in the gorgeous, captivating new Whitney retrospective, there’s just no disputing their aesthetic authority or their eerie power. Eggleston’s approach may appear random, but every photo subscribes to a meticulous logic. Even so, compositional rigour is only part of what will glue these pictures to your memory and haunt you long after you’ve left the museum. The shower, the oven, the ketchup bottles and the pinball machines all capture the inadvertent, even perverse, poetry of the specific and the mundane. At the dark heart of Eggleston’s enterprise lies a mixture of tenderness and contempt for the time and place he inherited and consummately claimed as his own: the American South in the latter half of the 20th century.
Eggleston is a child of that South, though he rejects the label of “Southern artist”. Born in 1939 in Sumner, Mississippi, he has spent most of his adult life in Memphis, Tennessee, and all of his best pictures were taken in and around his native ground. He is an American aristocrat and dandy whose privileged childhood unfurled on his grandfather’s plantation in the Mississippi Delta and at the family home in nearby Sumner, a small town whose landmark is the courthouse where the infamous Emmett Till murder trial took place in 1955. (Till was a 14-year-old black boy who was lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman; his killers, who later confessed, were acquitted.)
Though that blatant miscarriage of justice helped ignite the civil rights movement, it’s hard to find any trace of racial or political turmoil in Eggleston’s oeuvre. Which isn’t to say his art is apathetic. Many of the pictures evince wistfulness, loathing and even love. But those emotions percolate through the distinctive colours and textures of his part of the world. He wasn’t interested in social change, but in the loners, eccentrics and humdrum souls who turned strange and surreal through his viewfinder.
That was the one lesson he internalised from his hero Henri Cartier-Bresson, who himself had been an early admirer of surrealism, and whose best pictures involve odd and disorienting juxtapositions. Eggleston taught himself to make “a perfect fake Cartier-Bresson”, but understood that straight imitation would lead only to a creative dead end. “After a while I had to face the fact that what I had to do was go out into foreign landscapes,” he said later. And how did this native Mississippian define foreign? “What was new back then was shopping centres – and I took pictures of them.”
His first success was a grocery boy pushing shopping carts, caught in the glow of the dying day. The dull labourer, bathed in elegiac light, metamorphoses into a youthful Adonis with flawless skin and radiant blond hair.
Much has been made of Eggleston’s injection of colour into art photography, but it’s only in combination with his brilliant use of light that his palette reaches maximal potency. Take, for instance, a shot of a kitchen sink that Eggleston turns into a white symphony worthy of Whistler. The late afternoon sun, angling in from the left, casts a celestial radiance upon an over-full dish rack and an old orange juice carton, enveloping the rest of the room in shades of eggshell, ivory and pale gold. The artist uncovers – or does he bestow? – the beatitude of the banal. He sees heaven in a porcelain basin, eternity in an hour.
Eggleston’s ability to alchemise blunt fact into reticent lyricism recalls Walker Evans, whose lonely frame houses, village churches, and sign-laden storefronts masked his classical artistry. Evans read the kitchens and corners of sharecroppers’ homes as cubist exercises; Eggleston turns diners, bars, yards and storefronts into arrangements of colour that evoke the more baroque compositions of the Abstract Expressionists. Certain colours keep reappearing, such as the silvery artichoke green we see in a set of vinyl coffee shop settees, a row of abandoned storefronts, and the walls of curtains of a Sumner home. He often accents that glaucous hue with the pale pink or red of a woman’s shirt or a gaudy lampshade.
FINANCIAL TIMES
By Ariella Budick
Published: November 13 2008
