Forty-One False Starts

by Janet Malcolm

  His monumental (fifty-seven by seventy-four inches) portrait of the eight members of the Ayvar family in Lima is a rare encounter with poverty. That the family is poor may be inferred from the room in which they sit—a piece of plasterboard with cracks in it appears behind the group; the foreground shows part of a patterned velvet sofa over which a sheet has been thrown to hide something torn or ruined; a dark, muddy linoleum covers the floor; a small, cheap religious print hangs high on the wall. Clearly the spareness of the room is an object not of advanced taste, but of want, of not having the things that advanced taste keeps at bay. The family members—a tiny dark-haired mother, a gray-haired father, and six children, ranging in age from a seven-or eight-year-old boy to a grown son and daughter—sit at a small table facing the photographer. A current of sympathy runs between the subjects and the photographer that brings to mind the sympathy that flowed between Walker Evans and the sharecropper family he photographed in Dust Bowl Alabama in the 1930s. But with this difference: Evans’s black-and-white photographs are heavyhearted pictures. They show the hopelessness of the struggle of the people they dignify and beautify. The smell of poverty wafts out of them. If any smell wafts out of the photograph of the Ayvars, it is that of laundry detergent. The father’s crisply ironed short-sleeved dress shirt, the children’s neat white and pastel-colored T-shirts, decorated with cartoons, and, most conspicuously, the bleached white cloth draped over the table, every stitch of whose green-and-red cross-stitched border is made visible, you could almost say celebrated, by the oversize print’s magnification—all this creates a gestalt that is far removed from that of the rueful Evans’s homage to the dirt-poor. As with all of Struth’s photographs, it is hard to say what “statement” it makes, but its note is characteristically cheering, even elating. The dazzling white cross-stitched tablecloth (to which the eye is drawn as if to a central figure) emblematizes the work’s optimism, like that of an Easter Sunday service—or an encounter with a friendly photographer.

  As Struth and I were looking at another big picture, and he was pointing out something in its foreground, a museum guard suddenly materialized and told him that he was standing too close and should step back behind a line on the floor. Struth did not say, “I took that picture,” but obediently stepped back behind the line. A little further into our tour of the show, the guard—a small woman of Japanese origin, now informed of Struth’s identity—reappeared and profusely apologized for her blunder. Struth good-humoredly reassured her, but she could not stop apologizing and finally withdrew, walking backward with her hands held in supplication and her head bobbing up and down in little Japanese bows.

  The picture we had been standing in front of showed a semi-submersible oil rig in a shipyard on Geoje Island in South Korea—a huge red thing, a colossus on four legs on a platform afloat near the shore, taut cables anchoring it to the concrete pavement onshore, on which piles of miscellaneous building materials are strewn. The photograph (110 by 138 inches) magisterially represents what can be called the new optics of the new photography, which sees the world as no human eye does. When you look at these photographs, it is as if you were looking through strange new bifocals that focus on things at a distance at the same moment that they focus on things close up. Everything is equally sharp. Struth’s photograph of Notre Dame is another striking example of this phenomenon. Every detail of the facade is rendered in razor sharpness, as are the clothes and knapsacks of the dwarfed tourists in the plaza in front of it. Reproductions of these photographs in books give only a hint of their breathtaking strangeness. One needs to see them full size to marvel at them.

  After the museum, Struth took me to his studio, which was in the process of being dismantled. It was a very long room on the second floor of a former printing plant, filled with desks and computers, sofas and bookcases, a drum set, and a narrow mattress on the floor neatly covered with blankets, where, after giving up his Düsseldorf apartment, Struth would sleep when in town. Windows facing the street lined one long wall, and a line of black file boxes sat on the floor along the wall opposite. These files, which relate to the business end of Struth’s enterprise, were being reorganized before being shipped to Berlin; Struth wanted them to be in order before the move. Much of Struth’s work these days is running his business. His art has made him rich, and his dealings with the people who have made him (and themselves) so occupy a good portion of his time (and of the studio’s functions). He is on the phone a lot: someone is always calling him about some business particular; he seems to be under pressure.

  It wasn’t always like this, he told me, and cited two events that changed his life from that of a carefree rich artist to that of one who feels he has to hustle to remain one. The first was the renovation, in 2005, for a hundred and fifty thousand euros, of the Düsseldorf studio. The second was his marriage, in 2007, to Tara Bray Smith, a young American writer who gracefully accepted living in Düsseldorf for two and a half years and then proposed the move to Berlin—which Struth was happy to make. “The time was over. I was so used to Düsseldorf—it seemed good to move somewhere else.” Good but not cheap.

  “Before I did the renovation of the studio and before I got married, I had one assistant, not three, I needed very little money, my apartment was very inexpensive,” Struth said. “I made much more money than I needed—and I paid a fifty percent tax to the German state. Then I did the renovation, I met Tara, we moved to Berlin, I rented a studio there that was six thousand euros a month, I hired two more assistants, Tara said she would love to have a small place in New York, and I thought, Okay, it makes sense, and we found one, though a bigger place than I thought. All of a sudden my expenses exploded, and I felt much more pressure to sell.” I asked Struth what his photographs sell for, and he replied that at Marian Goodman, in New York, it is around a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The gallery takes fifty percent, and the state takes fifty percent of Struth’s share. Goodman sold thirty-five pictures in his last show, in 2010, but in Berlin only ten pictures sold that year. “There’s never certainty,” he said. At the same time, “I’m not worried. There’s always something.” For example: a commission from a billionaire (who wishes to go unnamed) to photograph his family, which Struth might not have accepted when he was flush and photographing only people he knew and liked.

  At the studio, Struth leafed through the catalog of the Metropolitan Museum exhibition to illustrate another seminal event. This was the taking of a photograph entitled The Restorers at San Lorenzo Maggiore, on the last day of a three-month stay in Naples, in 1988. In Naples, Struth experienced the famous effect that the South has on industrious Northerners. “I discovered I was just very happy there. I fell in love twice. I thought, I’m not only the strict German; I have some joyful capacity in me that wasn’t unearthed until now.” The picture—a lovely composition in muted ocher and umber colors of four people posed in front of a long row of the large old religious paintings on which they have been working in a high-ceilinged room in a former abbey—was the first photograph Struth saw reason to print big. It was also the work that opened the door to the project for which he is perhaps best known: his museum pictures. These show what we see when we walk into a museum gallery: people looking at paintings. We only secondarily see the pictures themselves.

  For about a decade Struth ingeniously played with this conceit. In some of the museum photographs, the relationship between disturbing subject matter—such as that of The Raft of the Medusa—and unperturbed viewers was the point, or part of it. In others, spatial relationships were explored, such as in the photograph entitled Galleria dell’Accademia I, a work showing Veronese’s Feast in the House of Levi, whose depth perspective supports the momentary illusion that the visitors in shorts and jeans standing before it are about to enter its bustling scene. Yet another concept was to focus solely on museum visitors, photographing them from the point of view of the work they were gazing at. In one series, Struth shows tourists at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence gazing up at M
ichelangelo’s David and in another at The Hermitage, looking at a da Vinci Madonna and Child. These “audience” pictures are intermittently amusing but, to my mind, a bit trite. We have seen pictures of unself-consciously gaping tourists before. I am also unable to appreciate the series called Paradise, large, straightforward pictures of jungles and forests. (“His jungles look like the potted plants in a dentist’s office,” the critic Lee Siegel wrote in 2003, putting his finger on it.)

  Struth’s photographs taken in factories, laboratories, and nuclear power plants, on the other hand, look like nothing one has ever seen before. These glimpses into what the critic Benjamin Buchloh calls “the technological sublime” were on view at Marian Goodman last year and constitute some of Struth’s most powerful images. While at SolarWorld with Struth, I had these images in mind. The feeling of not understanding what one is seeing, of not knowing the functions of madly tangled wires and tubes and cables and mysterious flanges and pulleys and levers, is brilliantly conveyed by these huge pictures of places few of us have ventured into and on whose products many of us depend. Predictably, the places are not satanic mills, but belong to the world of Struth’s benign photographic vision. They reassure even as they baffle. They tell us that the people who are absent from the pictures are back there somewhere and that they know what it all means and know what they are doing.

  On our way out of the Düsseldorf studio, Struth paused to play a twenty-second riff on the drums, relics of the days when he played in a rock band. We drove to my hotel for dinner, where Struth—after ascertaining that he wouldn’t be acting like a rude guest—joined me in mocking the pretentious food served in mercifully stingy portions. (Everywhere else I ate in Germany, the food was elegant and delicious.) Back in New York, I have been corresponding with Struth by e-mail. In August, he sent me digital images of four of the pictures he had taken at SolarWorld. They were both surprising—while at the factory I hadn’t “seen” any of these images myself—and of a piece with the incomparable Marion Goodman photographs. I wrote to ask if he or Hirsch could also send me the snapshots that, after the formal sitting, Hirsch had taken of the Queen and the Duke looking at a picture of Struth’s dog, Gabby, which Struth had thought to pack when making his meticulous preparations. Hirsch promptly sent three of them. They are wonderful. My favorite shows Elizabeth beautifully smiling at the picture of the dog that Struth and Philip hold toward her as they broadly grin at each other over her head. In another e-mail Struth wrote that he had heard from the curator of the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery that Philip “was clearly touched by the portrait, and asked, ‘How did he do that?’ ” I wrote back and asked about the Queen’s reaction, and the answer was that it was unknown. In a recent e-mail Struth wrote, “Still have not given up to find out what the Queen thinks. I tried to get in touch with the dresser, but I heard they are all in Scotland right now.” He added, “Not that that is at the top of my agenda.”

  A HOUSE OF ONE’S OWN

  1995

  If one is to try to record one’s life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.

  —Leonard Woolf, The Journey Not the Arrival Matters

  The legend of Bloomsbury—the tale of how Virginia and Vanessa Stephen emerged from a grim, patriarchal Victorian background to become the pivotal figures in a luminous group of advanced and free-spirited writers and artists—takes its plot from the myth of modernism. Legend and myth alike trace a movement from darkness to light, turgid ugliness to plain beauty, tired realism to vital abstraction, social backwardness to social progress. Virginia Woolf chronicles her own and her sister’s coming-of-age in the early years of this century much as Nikolaus Pevsner celebrated the liberating simplifications of modern design in his once influential but now perhaps somewhat outdated classic Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936). As Pevsner shuddered over the “coarseness and vulgar overcrowding” of a carpet shown in the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London (“We are forced to step over bulging scrolls and into large, unpleasantly realistic flowers . . . And this barbarism was by no means limited to England. The other nations exhibiting were equally rich in atrocities”), so Virginia, in her memoir “Old Bloomsbury” (1922), recoiled from the suffocating closeness of her childhood home, at 22 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington—a tall, narrow, begloomed house of small, irregular rooms crammed with heavy Victorian furniture, where “eleven people aged between eight and sixty lived, and were waited upon by seven servants, while various old women and lame men did odd jobs with rakes and pails by day.” And, as Pevsner turned with relief to the spare, sachlich designs of the twentieth-century pioneers, so Virginia exulted in the airy and spacious house on Gordon Square, in Bloomsbury, where she and Vanessa and their brothers, Thoby and Adrian, went to live by themselves in 1904, after the death of their father. (Vanessa was twenty-five, Thoby was twenty-four, Virginia was twenty-two, and Adrian was twenty-one.) “We decorated our walls with washes of plain distemper,” Virginia wrote, and, “We were full of experiments and reforms . . . We were going to paint; to write; to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock. Everything was going to be new; everything was going to be different. Everything was on trial.”

  Nine years earlier, when Virginia was thirteen, her mother, Julia Stephen, had died, suddenly and unexpectedly, of rheumatic fever, at the age of forty-nine, and two years after that Stella Duckworth, one of Julia’s three children from a previous marriage, who had become the angel of the house in Julia’s place, died of peritonitis, at the age of twenty-eight. These deaths only darkened the darkness, coarsened the atrocious figures in the carpet. Leslie Stephen, the eminent Victorian writer and editor, tyrannized the household with his Victorian widower’s hysterical helplessness, and George Duck-worth, Stella’s brainless brother, couldn’t keep his hands off Vanessa and Virginia while affecting to comfort them. Virginia’s strength was unequal to the pressure of “all these emotions and complications.” A few weeks after Leslie’s death, she fell seriously ill. “I had lain in bed at the Dickinsons’ house at Welwyn”—Violet Dickinson was then her best friend—“thinking that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using the foulest possible language among Ozzie Dickinson’s azaleas,” Virginia wrote of this descent into madness, the second in the series (the first followed her mother’s death) by which her life was plagued and eventually cut short. When she recovered—the antipsychotics of the time were bed rest, overfeeding, and boredom—her old home was gone and the new was in place. It was on Vanessa’s sturdier shoulders that the weight of life at Hyde Park Gate had fallen after Stella’s death (her siblings called her the Saint when they wanted to enrage her), and it was she who engineered the move to Gordon Square, selecting the neighborhood (then an unfashionable one), finding the new house, renting the old one, and distributing, selling, and burning its accretions.

  There is a photograph of Stella, Virginia, and Vanessa, taken in 1896, the year after Julia’s death, in which a classically profiled Stella looks demurely downward; an ethereal Virginia, in half profile, gazes pensively, perhaps a little strangely, into the middle distance; and mild Vanessa stares straight into the camera, her features set in an expression of almost harsh resolve. Without Vanessa’s determination—and by the time of Leslie Stephen’s death she was already making good on her ambition to be an artist, having studied drawing and painting since her early teens—it is doubtful whether the flight of the orphans to Gordon Square would have taken place. Nor, more to the point, would there have been the Thursday evening parties that were, Virginia playfully wrote, “as far as I am concerned the germ from which sprang all that has since come to be called—in newspapers, in novels, in Germany, in France, I daresay, in Turkey and Timbuktu—by the name of Bloomsbury.” A period of happiness had begun that, as Virginia described it, was like the giddy early months of freshman life at college. She and Vane
ssa had not, of course, gone to college—even girls from literary families like the Stephens did not go to college then—but Thoby had gone to Cambridge, and came home on vacations to tell his wide-eyed sisters of his remarkable friends: of the frail, ultracultivated Lytton Strachey, who once, as Virginia wrote, “burst into Thoby’s rooms, cried out, ‘Do you hear the music of the spheres?’ and fell in a faint”; of an “astonishing fellow called Bell. He’s a sort of mixture between Shelley and a sporting country squire”; of a “very silent and thin and odd” man named Saxon Sydney-Turner, who was “an absolute prodigy of learning” and “had the whole of Greek literature by heart.” These and other Cambridge classmates became the Thursday-evening harbingers of Bloomsbury and the sisters’ initiators into the pleasures of late-night conversation on abstract subjects (beauty, reality, the good) with men who do not want to marry you and to whom you are not attracted. Evidently, they were an unprepossessing lot. “I thought that I had never seen young men so dingy, so lacking in physical splendor as Thoby’s friends,” Virginia wrote in “Old Bloomsbury” (doubtless exaggerating their nerdishness for comic effect; she wrote the piece to be read aloud to a gathering of Bloomsbury friends that included several of the ill-favored friends themselves). But “it was precisely this lack of physical splendor, this shabbiness! that was in my eyes a proof of their superiority. More than that, it was, in some obscure way, reassuring, for it meant that things could go on like this, in abstract argument, without dressing for dinner, and never revert to the ways, which I had come to think so distasteful, at Hyde Park Gate.” However, things could not go on like this; the period of happiness abruptly ended. Once again, as she writes in a later memoir, “A Sketch of the Past” (1939), “the lashes of the random unheeding, unthinking flail,” which had “brutally and pointlessly” destroyed Julia and Stella, descended on the Stephen family. In the fall of 1906, on a trip to Greece with his siblings, Thoby Stephen contracted typhoid and, apparently because of medical bungling (his illness was at first diagnosed as malaria), died a month after his return to England, at the age of twenty-six.