While reading David Levi Strauss’ rebuttal of Andy Grundberg’s critique of Robert Bergman’s solo show at the National Gallery of Art, one is reminded of another moment in the history of art and criticism.

In his book The Shock of the New, former TIME magazine art critic Robert Hughes observes that, “… the first avant-garde artist, in the full sense of the word, offering both newness and confrontation—was Gustave Courbet, in whom the image of the artist-against-the-system was rounded out…. no artist, up to then, had so firmly set himself against the reigning taste of the day…. Everything about him looked threatening, and was so caricatured…. above all, his ‘coarse’, brilliant, unidealistic work.”

In Aperture magazine Issue 199, Critic Andy Grundberg begins his review of the recent National Gallery of Art exhibition: Robert Bergman, Portraits, 1986-1995, with a grossly unflattering caricature. He cites the plot of a 1998 John Waters art-world-spoof film “Pecker” as his opening paradigm. As Grundberg sees it, both the fictional teen photo-sensation Pecker, and real-life, veteran photographer Robert Bergman, “spring onto the art-world stage like Athena from the head of Zeus.” What follows is a series of character slurs, peppered with just enough formal description, apparently, to meet minimum editorial standards for publishing art criticism. Grundberg’s ad hominem attack on Bergman is so irrational as to initially bewilder. As if describing something loathsome, Grundberg selects dismissive and demeaning language, phrases such as “what is afoot here”…. “nominally intriguing”….. “willful and seemingly quixotic enterprise”…. “latter day Bowery Bum photography”…. “a tad more sophisticated than Pecker”….” and “a half-century too late.”

Not content to attack the photographs, he passes moral judgment on the artist. “It is really Bergman’s motives for choosing to photograph the people he does, that remain the central question,” Grundberg asserts, and then vaguely implies there is some failed responsibility on the part of the artist to the people and social conditions he observed. Bergman’s decision to avoid extrapictorial detail about the people in titles for his pictures garners additional scorn, the critic resenting that this only makes you look more closely at the elements in the photographs. Grundberg’s final paragraph concludes: “Bergman is out to convince us that he is a great photographer.”

Yet more mystifying is that Grundberg is so reckless as to commit to print in a magazine for knowledgeable photography devotees, an error as stark as his ignorant claim that “scarcely anyone had heard of Bergman before this show, much less seen one of his pictures.” Grundberg was busily writing reviews and recommendations of new photography books for The New York Times in the fall of 1998 when Bergman’s “A Kind of Rapture” was published. (This book is the collection of portraits from which the National Gallery show was chosen.) The critic would have us believe that not only was he oblivious to its publication, but that he also failed to get wind of the four-page illustrated October 1998 profile of Bergman in The New Yorker magazine which introduced millions of readers to the artist and his photographs. It defies reason to think that Grundberg would not himself have learned of Bergman at that time, if not in the years since. As David Levi Strauss points out, long prior to the National Gallery exhibition that Grundberg reviews, highly positive criticism of Bergman’s work was published by authors A.D. Coleman, Margo Jefferson, John Yau, Katie Siegel, Vicki Goldberg, Paul Mattick, Toni Morrison and Meyer Schapiro. Levi Strauss himself wrote a brilliant short essay on Bergman in 2004. Consider that Grundberg’s employer at the time, The New York Times, printed the substantive Margo Jefferson review of Bergman’s work in October 1999, and you have to wonder why Grundberg misinforms his readers in the matter of critical acclaim Bergman had already earned.

The derogatory rhetoric to which Grundberg resorts ceases to bewilder, when one compares it with Alexandre Dumas’ harsh attacks on Courbet. Dumas not only denounced Courbet’s paintings, he denounced the artist, describing Courbet’s person as resulting from a combination of fatty oozings, manure, beer, corrosive mucous and flatulent swellings. Narrating the film version of The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes explains that “people don’t write art criticism like that anymore, not because of editorial timidity, but because no one feels threatened by art the way they used to.” Well, not until Grundberg encountered Bergman, apparently. As Dumas attacked Courbet “in the sort of language that societies use to punish malefactors” (Hughes), so Grundberg maligns the motives of the artist and even the museum that presents his work.

Like Dumas, does Grundberg feel that what he stands for is being seriously threatened? Inasmuch as there is an art world system of art schools, galleries, art magazines, newspaper columns, critics, museums, television documentaries, canonized masters and their collectors, is Grundberg simply fulfilling his obligatory role as a functionary of that system? For him to witness the photographs of Robert Bergman gaining international acclaim, without the artist first being vetted through all the lower ranks of that system, must have shaken Grundberg to his core. At least so it seems–given the shrillness of his snide disdain for these photographs and the artist who created them.

Valid art criticism develops meaningful distinctions, and does not purposely suppress them. Grundberg’s assertion that these portraits are nothing more than what we have seen before comes across as a political and manipulative attempt to suppress the singular nature of Bergman’s portraits.

When you see the works of Robert Bergman for yourself, you realize just how misguided Grundberg is in his critique. Bergman is not trying to convince us that he is a great photographer. He doesn’t need to, and that is not even a worthy question. In their eloquent silence, the photographs alone are enough to convince us that we are in the presence of art that is indisputably significant, if not also great and timeless.

Del Rey Loven

Grundberg’s Critical and Intellectual Duplicity
Over nearly 30 years, Grundberg has written dozens of often thoughtful reviews and essays about photographers, who, like Bergman, take pictures on the streets, do portraits, work in color, deal with aspects of the human condition, and challenge viewers to feel and think outside their comfort zone. But Bergman stands alone, the intended object of a cynical double standard. Judging Bergman by criteria that are the opposite of ones he has long professed, Grundberg is duplicitous on nearly every point he makes.

Grundberg has supported or ignored the withholding of names and biographical information (a staple in museums and galleries): “… [Nicholas] Nixon’s faith in the photograph’s powers of persuasion goes even deeper; unlike Hine and Lange, he feels no need to provide captions to tell us what we are seeing.” He also commends Philip-Lorca diCorsia for his very different methods and message. He “… captures anonymous unintentional actors as they move zombielike, through gritty, hyperactive asphalt and concrete spaces”. Mute anonymity is no problem for Grundberg.

Very much alive, Bergman’s people speak with individual voices, eyes, and spirits for themselves. To Grundberg, this is unforgivable. And, I would suggest, deeply, personally unsettling.

Next, Grundberg condemns, as if it were a moral transgression, the portrayal of pain in Bergman’s work. But he has been favorable to Diane Arbus and Salgado even though their work was prominent among those that troubled Susan Sontag, whom he invokes to support his point. But he has praised the capture of tough material and strong feeling in the images of other photographers, for example, Robert Frank and Nan Goldin. This topic as it relates to Bergman’s subjects and Grundberg’s review was recently addressed in a fair and nuanced way in “(Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography”
http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/2010/06/robert-bergman-and-democracy-of.html .

It is also hard to tell whether Grundberg’s stunted portrayal of the extraordinarily wide range of emotions revealed in Bergman’s work is an expression of his own obtuseness or of the self-imposed blindness he needs in order to buttress his tortured argument. Anyone who has looked carefully at the full range of portraits in National Gallery exhibition or A Kind of Rapture, the book of Bergman’s portraits, or for that matter, the three photographs accompanying the original Aperture piece, can see that, far from only showing pain, they contain what Vicki Goldberg has seen in Bergman https://www.brooklynrail.org/2004/05/art/bergman — “the vicissitudes of being human” — and more.

Grundberg’s Attack on Bergman’s Artistic Quest
Grundberg is reduced to making snide, adolescent attempts to demolish Bergman’s legitimacy and trivialize his 45 year struggle to bring his vision to the public: “Bergman’s professed ambition … to launch his exhibiting career at this museum [National Gallery of Art], and with a one-person show no less…”. As if, unlike any other photographer’s, Bergman’s ambition drains his art of art itself.

He opens a very positive review of a Lisette Model retrospective noting that she was “… a creature of legend — much of it of her own making ….”. Cindy Sherman’s coy projections of herself made the cover of Time magazine, Grundberg’s book, Crisis of the Real, and one version of Aperture’s anniversary Issue 200. He did not demean Richard Avedon for his skillfully pursued road to celebrity. In a positive, if ironic review of An Autobiography, he wrote “… Mr. Avedon [is] at his most characteristic: … manipulative of his audience …obsessed with the judgments of a disembodied posterity.”

Grundberg’s Attack on the National Gallery of Art
I am deeply troubled that Grundberg wrote his review without mention or regard for his obvious conflict of interest. His institution, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, is something of a rival, in Washington, DC at least, to the National Gallery of Art. The Corcoran has its (his) own photography school, a photography exhibition program and acquisitions agenda, and a need to raise funds from much the same donor community.

Hiding behind a dishonored shield of critical independence, if not impartiality, he launches an insidious assault on the integrity of the National Gallery of Art. Why, except institutional reputation fratricide, would Grundberg suggest that Sarah Greenough, the National Gallery of Art’s Senior Curator of Photographs, and the entire National Gallery hierarchy were wrestled into submission by Bergman’s siege or became his co-conspirators?

Grundberg knows full well that it would have taken several years for the chain of decision makers, from the curator to the trustees, to decide to bring almost one hundred of Bergman’s portraits into the National Gallery of Art’s permanent collection and another extended round of scrutiny to mount an exhibition years later.

The appearance of a conflict should have been reason enough for Aperture to think twice about publishing his review. Its content should have left no doubt.

Michael Washburn