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"Avedon's Endgame"
By Maria Morris Hambourg and Mia Fineman
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Richard Avedon is a man possessed. Passionate about theater, he may attend the same play week after week, seeking new insight, variant shades of characterization, and changes in his own perceptions. He haunts art cinemas, portrait galleries, and museums, and his thirst for literature, especially for Shakespeare, Chekhov, Proust, and Beckett, is unslakeable; his oceanic library has engulfed his living space and laps at the raft of his bed. Whatever he gleans from his obsessive studies in the secret nature of humanity is turned to account in his work.
Although often confused with the fashion photographer and society portraitist, this Richard Avedon works not for gain or glory but out of private necessity. His life work is portraiture, but his pictures are rarely assigned; they are more often self-generated, born of imagination and achieved with collaborators willing to be annexed for a longer life in art. An irrepressible innovator, Avedon has consistently defied conventional expectations about what a portrait is supposed to look like, always avoiding tired formulas—the writer in his book-lined study, the pianist at the baby grand—and offering instead a radically purified approach to the genre. By dint of progressive challenges to himself, he has not only distilled photographic portraiture to its irreducible core, but also has produced an extended meditation on life, death, art, and identity in the form of a vast collective portrait of America in the second half of the twentieth century.
Essay from the exhibition publication, Richard Avedon: Portraits (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2002), available in the online Met Store
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