HEAD ON.(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York)(Brief Article)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 23-SEP-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The first image in the new show of Richard Avedon photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the picture that visitors will come upon as they enter, is not just the earliest, dating from 1947; it is also the happiest. A small Sicilian boy in a pale cap, his jacket buttoned tight across his chest like the trademark of a vaudeville patsy, stands and delivers his best grin. There is something formal--not fixed, but maybe too decorous for mere cheek--in the width of his smile, and you notice the hands clamped firmly to his sides. It is unlikely that he has been ordered to radiate pleasure (Avedon is not his uncle, or a fearsome aunt, and this is no family snap), but that is how the child has chosen to present himself, and the choice, as in all portraiture, is like a ticket that enables both artist and sitter to cross into the realms of the true. Avedon sees what Nadar saw, almost a century before in France, or, for that matter, what Van Dyck saw when confronted with an English king: there is poetry in the pose.

As visitors leave the exhibit, an hour or more later, they may be forgiven for wondering where the smiles went. By Avedon's own admission, one of the first photographs that he took as a boy, gathering his courage and his box Brownie, was of Rachmaninoff, and the composer would feel mournfully at home in this environment. Is there any clue, when you mount the steps of the Met and read the banner title, "Richard Avedon: Portraits," that you are heading for the retrospective of a working tragedian? The last time the museum laid on an Avedon show, in 1978, the core of the work was his fashion photography, lithe with kinetic wit. As a general rule, tragedy tends not to get invited to any universe...

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