ART REVIEW : PHOTOS BY ‘AMERICAN IN PARIS’

“It’s not necessary to make order out of chaos,” photographer William Klein has said. “Chaos itself is interesting.”

Klein should know. His works are aggressive, confrontational, provocative. They are also improvisatory and participative.

A large retrospective exhibition of photographs by the expatriate American artist who has lived in Paris for 40 years is now on view at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park.

Titled “William Klein: An American in Paris,” the exhibition includes 120 black-and-white images spanning the past three decades and four photo-murals, a format of recent interest to the artist.

His aesthetic has been so consistent that the images in the exhibition have been installed, at his insistence, without regard to chronology, although they span 30 years. Nevertheless, they work, as does the museum’s customary crowding of works, which reflects the way Klein immerses himself in the hurly-burly of urban street life.

There is a surreal edge to Klein’s work in the sense that he pulls his images from life, seemingly unmediated through rational consciousness, as the surrealists pulled theirs from the subconscious.

He also gambles with chance, plunging into turbulent crowds and shooting without being able to focus. Such images are truly “ready-mades,” there for his discovery and use. But of course the artist’s eye identifies or selects what is art--which may even be a detail from a frame, such as the well-known “4 Heads, Thanksgiving Day” (New York, 1954).

Among his innovations, he pioneered using telephoto and wide-angle lenses in the streets.

Klein, 59, favors crowded images of people whose attention is focused beyond the camera’s range so that what we see is a human response to an event, not the event itself. Often the event is a funeral--of influential philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre, of revered French Communist leader Maurice Thorez, or of beloved popular singer Tino Rossi.

He is sensitive as well to religious fervor, as in “Rain, Lourdes” (1984) and “Nuns See Pope” (Rome, 1956); to political enthusiasm, as in “Political Rally and Neons” (Paris, 1974) and the photo-mural “Republique,” and to sports mania, as in the photo-mural “Soccer Match.” Often, we become engaged through the gaze of one subject looking straight at the photographer--and us.

Klein, in evincing a special sensitivity to children, as in “Baseball Cards” (New York, 1954) and “Kids and Buddha” (Tokyo, 1961), reminds us that an artist must in an important way remain a child, able to see naively.

Klein holds a mirror up to the world, giving us reflections of it informed by his artist’s eye but innocent of judgment. By remaining true to art, he has created a profoundly humanistic body of work in which life is neither tragic nor comic, it just is . And it is infinitely interesting and energetic. His special magic is his ability to engage us in his vision.

This is Klein’s first major exhibition in this country. The Museum of Photographic Arts is its sole venue. Its appearance is of such importance that it is one of the few Southern California exhibitions ever to gain attention in Time magazine (March 9 issue).

Klein’s large, architectonically abstract paintings of the early 1950s reflected an interest in graphics, an interest that also appears in the photographs “5-D Gasoline” and “Cowhey Marine Supplies,” both made in New York in 1954. As intricately composed as the works of Kurt Schwitters, they may be regarded as “found” collages.

For a decade, Klein made fashion photographs for Vogue magazine using an off-hand style that mocked fashion tradition. (None of this work, unfortunately, is included in the San Diego exhibition.) At the time of a major German photography exhibition, “Photokina,” in 1963, he was named one of the 30 most important figures in the history of the medium. Then he abandoned street photography to make films for 15 years. A selection of shorter works is included in the exhibition in video form.

In the 1980s, Klein began to make still images again.

The very modest catalogue contains a mere dozen reproductions and an “appreciation” by curator-museum director Arthur Ollman, and it lacks substantial scholarly content and apparatus (there is no bibliography of articles about the artist, for example). The exhibition continues through April 5.