A keen eye for artists

In the Getty Research Institute’s current exhibition of photographs by Alexander Liberman, there is an image of Marcel Duchamp that must rank among the most striking ever taken of this famously inscrutable character. In it, we see the artist reclining slightly, gazing to the right of the viewer, pressing his index finger thoughtfully to his lips. Conservatively dressed in a dark sport jacket and plaid shirt, his hair combed neatly back, he might easily be mistaken for a doctor, scholar or politician. But there’s no doubting from the image that he embodies greatness in some capacity. His face is handsomely wizened and noble; his eyes have a piercing intelligence, as though masking profound thoughts.

Alongside this photograph in the exhibition is a large binder open to an original contact sheet containing this and 24 other images captured within the same few moments. But it tells a notably different story. Here, we find the photographer slowly circling the artist, snapping pictures in rapid succession in the expectation of that one lucky hit, while his subject waits self-consciously, clearly tracking the movement in his peripheral vision. Most of these images are entirely banal, conveying Duchamp not as an enigmatic genius but as a preoccupied old man sitting on a sofa. Were the winning image -- so singularly arresting in isolation -- not distinguished by an enthusiastic red circle, you might not notice it here.

The moral of the story: Even the truly great need a little help to look the part.

As art director for Vogue and editorial director of Conde Nast Publications for 50 years (between the 1940s and the 1990s), Liberman surely understood this fact better than most. As a painter and sculptor, moreover, he had a great fondness for artists and a keen eye for their distinguishing qualities. By featuring them prominently over the course of his career in fashion shoots and profiles (many of which he wrote and photographed himself, then collected in a 1960 book titled “The Artist in His Studio”), Liberman played a major role in introducing modern art to mainstream America.

The current exhibition, drawn from the more than 100,000 images Liberman (who died in 1999) bequeathed to the Getty, consists exclusively of his portraits, removed from the context of their original publication. Roughly half of these, taken over the course of 10 summers spent in Europe, feature the stars of the then-aging Paris School, including Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Chagall and Leger. The rest feature artists of Liberman’s generation, the second wave of the New York School: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler and others.

Designed to mark the end of the Research Institute’s 2002-03 scholar year, the show takes a somewhat academic approach to its subject, peppering its wall texts with theoretical questions meant to give some indication of the terms by which the prestigious program’s 31 scholars-in-residence went about addressing the issue of biography, this year’s theme. “What qualities make a photograph of an artist a ‘good’ photograph?” “Is it possible to make a meaningful connection between the physical appearance of an artist and the body of work he or she produces?” If Liberman’s photographs affirm romantic stereotypes, “Is this because [he] manipulated his subject into posing a certain way, or was the artist himself playing a role for the camera?”

The images themselves, made prior to the postmodern onset of existential self-consciousness that has tended to spawn such questioning and for an audience presumably unconcerned with breaking down the ideological underpinnings of the biographical impulse, are largely oblivious to these concerns. They offer up what seems today an almost guilty pleasure: a glimpse into the studios of Modernism’s luminaries. To this end, they’re appealing and exceedingly palatable pictures, artistically accomplished and graced with a significant if not entirely radical degree of historical insight.

Particular compelling is the link Liberman continually draws between artist and artwork.

One lovely 1957 image conveys an aging but still sprightly Chagall gazing wistfully downward, while the wide-eyed face of a figure on one of his canvases looms protectively over his shoulder like a trusted companion.

In a robust 1965 image, the iconic face of Picasso appears suspended between what is presumably an artwork outside the frame of the picture, which he is earnestly scrutinizing, and the smooth, elegant face of his last wife, Jacqueline Roque, who hovers at his back, as if shielding him from everything beyond the sphere of his creativity.

Several images of Giacometti, whom Liberman called “a great philosopher,” convey a deep, brooding character. In one of the most memorable -- a vivid portrayal of the agony that can precede creation -- the artist sits heavily in one corner of the frame, forehead to fist like Rodin’s “Thinker,” while a dauntingly bare worktable weighs down the other, ominously expectant.

In humorous contrast is a portrait of Marie Laurencin: a tidily dressed, grandmotherly woman pictured in a genteel apartment living room, working on a small watercolor that is propped upon a lap table like a piece of embroidery.

Liberman’s images of the New York School feel somewhat less burdened with historical obligation and thus provide youthful, energetic portraits of artists who’ve by now become nearly as famous as their European predecessors.

In one hilarious pair of images, both taken in 1977, we see Johns seated conventionally in front of one of his paintings, regarding the camera with sharp suspicion, then standing on the deck of a house in the woods, his body boyishly awkward and his face distorted by a joyously goofy laugh. In another photo, taken 12 years earlier, we find a strikingly handsome young Rauschenberg in a clean but very humble studio/living space -- a pleasant reminder that everyone starts somewhere.

The artwork in these photographs, in keeping with its monumental aspirations, tends to fill the frame, often dwarfing the artist who created it. Frankenthaler, for example, appears engulfed in stacked canvases -- adrift among free-floating splashes of color. Newman, posing proudly in a neat suit and bow tie before an enormous blue canvas, looks something like an archeologist standing before a recently unearthed ancient monolith.

One of the simplest but most powerful images in the show depicts Agnes Martin, her back to the camera, facing a blank canvas that encapsulates her form and seems capable of swallowing her altogether, but for the palpable sense of courage with which she faces it.

It is an awe for this basic but profound drama between artist and canvas that seems to have motivated Liberman in the creation of these photographs. He took the pictures because he admired the subjects, and this admiration colors the representations throughout. It is easy to see the limitations of such an approach today -- it tends to express more about the mythology of an artist than his or her genuine nature -- but it can be enormously gratifying just the same.

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Alexander Liberman

Where: The Getty Research Institute, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

When: Tuesdays-Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.

Ends: Oct. 19

Price: Free, but parking $5. Parking reservations required Tue.-Fri., 10 a.m.-4 p.m. only.

Info: (310) 440-7300