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Friday, February 21, 2003

By Mary Thomas, Post-Gazette Art Critic

Ninety-three-year-old Berenice Abbott looks every bit the doyenne of her realm in a photograph taken at her Maine home on July 17, 1991, by Hank O'Neal.

Berenice Abbott appears left and Hank O'Neal on the right in "Double Portrait, 17 July 1990, on Lake Hebron." Of this photo, O'Neal writes: "After I took the picture of Berenice, she asked that I pass the camera over to her, she wanted to give it a try. We both took pictures of one another at the same time. What I find amazing is that at 92, she had no trouble with keeping me in focus, or pushing the shutter release without shaking. It was all accomplished in a boat that was floating on a choppy lake. She was not about to give up, even at such an advanced age." The photo is part of the exhibit "The Art of Sharing" at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg.

Assured and determined, her large eyes stare out at the viewer, one hand firmly gripping the arm of her porch chair while the other rests in her lap, her cropped thatch of gray hair and lined face giving her an androgynous look. A boldly patterned robe and jauntily tied ascot add a sporty flair to the portrait.

It would be her last.

The famed realist photographer died in December of that year, closing a chapter in photographic history.

O'Neal, her biographer and an accomplished photographer in his own right, describes her as "the most American of the great photographers who came to prominence in the United States during the first half of the Twentieth Century. She was self-reliant, solitary, sure of herself and largely self-taught; innovative, inventive and open minded, but distrustful of photographs which were 'arty,' pretentious or were merely copies of bad painting."

Ohio-born, she became part of the 1920s Paris avant-garde, learning photography as an assistant to Man Ray. She photographed Eugene Atget and, after his death, played an important role in the preservation of his prints and negatives and bringing them to public attention. Her 1930s documentation of New York City brought her acclaim, including exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and Museum of the City of New York.

	"Grubstakes, Packard's Camp. 1977. (Hank O'Neal, Westmoreland Museum of American Art)

In 1966, she closed her New York studio and moved to Maine, the place where her friendship with O'Neal developed over nearly two decades and the subject of the 55 black-and-white photographs that make up this exhibition.

With an outsider's eye that was both analytical and sympathetic, Abbott photographed classic Maine, including coastal lobster fishermen.

But more outstanding are images of less familiar aspects of the region's culture, such as the row of laughing women participating in a "mitten-knitting contest in the window of Sanders Store in Greenville," the men "Rushing the canoe through the snow to the slope in canoe tobogganing at Moosehead Lake," or the crowds watching the boy competing in "A greased pole contest," his limbs thrown out for balance as he inches along a flag-tipped horizontal pole that juts over a lake.

	"Lobster Fisherman, Dock and Traps" (Berenice Abbott, Westmoreland Museum of American Art)

Particularly sensitive is the rendering of "Aroostook County potato farmers," the foreground of which is filled by a lean elder in herringbone sport coat and newsboy cap, his shirt collar buttoned up, face in (symbolic?) shadow, each hair on his wrist and hand articulated by the sun's angle.

The aesthetic and personal compatibility between Abbott and O'Neal becomes most evident in pairings where visual comparisons may be made and a sense of the friendship -- including an ongoing competitive give-and-take between teacher and student -- is gained through O'Neal's anecdotal commentary.

The graphic power of Abbott's looming white frame Corea church -- which Abbott admired because it was a studio for painter Marsden Hartley in the 1940s when it was without a congregation -- foregrounded by a huge pile of chopped logs, is a case in point. Stripped to its virtue, it stands in contrast to O'Neal's idyllic representation of a Monson church, framed by trees and bushes, fronted by a waterway with canoe and occupied by "a bunch of kids." O'Neal says "Berenice didn't like churches, she didn't like hippies and she really didn't like pictures that were too pretty, so I never showed her this one."

	"Milliken's General Store on Sunday Morning, 1954" (Berenice Abbott, Westmoreland Museum of American Art)

In another Abbott photograph, from 1967, "A man of the sea at Spruce Head near Port Clyde in southeastern Maine" is caught in aging profile, wearing a peaked cap and boat shoes, sitting in a rocking chair against the background of a boat-dotted inlet. O'Neal's rocking "Chair in abandoned farmhouse, along Highway 6-16, August 1980, near Dover-Foxcroft" -- discovered during an outing that Abbott initiated -- is empty and speaks more directly to the mortality that Abbott's image implies.

O'Neal appears in one group photo, which he entered at Abbott's insistence, "Birthday Gathering, 17 July 1986, Lake Hebron."

No slouch himself when it comes to an eclectic life, onetime CIA operative O'Neal, as the founder of recording studio Chiaroscuro in 1970, has produced hundreds of CDs, concerts and music festivals, preserving and disseminating the music of jazz masters; has made photographic portraits of celebrities including Dizzy Gillespie, Allen Ginsberg and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; and is publishing his second book on Abbott.

His Sunday gallery talk promises to be more than the sum of those parts.

Mary Thomas can be reached at mthomas@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1925.