ART REVIEW : FAME MAY ATTRACT, BUT BEST PHOTOS ARE PLAIN

The star-gazer in most of us will approach the “Faces” exhibition at the Museum of Photographic Arts eager to view the legendary through the lenses of the great photographers. Here are classic portraits of such as Picasso, Sandburg, Duchamp and Sartre by the likes of Newman, Steichen, Penn and Cartier-Bresson. These 150 shots, from the staggering Hallmark Photographic Collection, afford a visual feast of wider appeal than anything the museum has offered in its two-year history, yet the famous faces are ultimately the least interesting things about the display.

The show is a rare example of legend overshadowed by anonymity. In the larger context occupied by Walker Evans’ Depression-era photos, Robert Capa’s wrenching World War II work or Paul Strand’s archetypal imagery of the Mexican revolution, the iconography of fame seems peculiarly flat. The guarded stare of Picasso; the voluptuous length of Marilyn Monroe; the cerebrating, pipe-in-mouth Sartre; the exquisitely cornered Duchamp; the coiled Cocteau--these virtuoso shots are so heavily invested with their subjects’ careful self-imaging that inscrutability becomes their theme, and nowhere in them can we really sense ourselves.

Not so in the other photos. Lewis Hine’s 1910 photo of a little girl glimpsed behind the door of a Chicago tenement--her posture suggestive of a ragged marionette--is the sort of image we can dive deeply into, getting a strong sense of poverty through a child’s eyes. Even Lisette Model’s arch depiction of the idle rich in Nice, or Brassai’s picaresque fille at a billiard table suggest our own potentials strikingly enough. By contrast, Edward Steichen’s mystique-ridden shots of Garbo, or a veiled Gloria Swanson, are quintessential face-as-mask studies--all surface.

This dichotomy is not so much a weakness of the show as the source of its excellent artistic tension. The voyeuristic instinct to scrutinize, from a safe distance, the face in the crowd is as strong as our curiosity about the famous faces that rise above the crowd. But where we can only feel outside the serenity of Matisse seen at home with his beloved pigeons (as captured by Henri Cartier-Bresson), we can identify electrically with Robert Capa’s Spanish woman as she clutches her small daughter’s hand and stares skyward, bravely and protectively, during a wartime air raid in Barcelona.

The observer realizes that the exhibit’s photographs of famous faces are infinitely less interpretive and less resonant--they’re exercises in technique and, mainly, public relations--than if their subjects were painted on canvas, whereas populist photography is much more a fulfillment of the promise of photographic art.

Among the most recent studies in the show, Nicholas Nixon’s simple yet haunting four-photo series of his wife and her three sisters--grouped annually from 1975 through 1978--is astonishingly expressive, offering four similar, unknown faces whose range of personality and subtle year-to-year changes draw us in as do few other visages in this show.

Then again, the theme of face-as-mask is quite clearly at the heart of many of the celebrity photographs, though John Gutman’s non-celebrity “Face Behind Veil” (1939) makes as strong a point as Steichen’s veiled Gloria Swanson without indulging the rhetoric of glamour. And for all its technical wizardry and dreamlike mood, Duane Michals’ 1966 depiction of surrealist painter Rene Magritte, bowler-hatted and viewed simultaneously from front and back, functions more as a celebrity logo than as an artwork: Magritte the man reduced to a Magritte.

Brilliantly, this display suggests how the most democratic of art forms can seem coldly elitist at the snap of shutter. By its realistic/surrealistic nature, photography dictates that subject is everything, our world and ourselves the ultimate subjects. Fame is a byproduct, not a photographic end in itself.

The exhibit continues through Aug. 25. For this run only, the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park has extended its hours to 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, until 9 p.m. Thursdays. At 7:30 p.m. July 10 exhibition curator Keith F. Davis will lecture on “Faces: The Photograph and Physiognomy” at the Natural History Museum.