A lasting vision Celebrating Aaron Siskind BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Still teaching Aaron Siskind may have seemed to follow in the shadow of Harry Callahan, recruited by that formidable photographer to the Institute of Design faculty in Chicago, and then again 20 years later to help him form a department of photography at Rhode Island School of Design in 1971. But by the time he settled in Providence, Siskind had done more than anyone else to urge modern photography away from the pictorial and toward the abstract, establishing it as an art form equal to painting. The current centenary Siskind exhibitions in Providence and Newport bring a wealth of pre-pixel photography to us, charting his progression from surrealist influences through social documentary concerns to found-image abstractions. Nancy Grinnell, curator at the Newport Art Museum, certainly put a lot of work into Aaron Siskind and His Rhode Island Circle, beginning two years ago. Budgetary constraints demanded that she borrow from local collections, but fortunately there are many. "It was fun and it was grueling," she said. "Because I not only had to go and meet these people, interview them and talk about what work we would include, but then I had to go out and pick it up, because I’m the art mover, too, with my assistant." She traveled as far as northern Vermont to arrange loans. But the most helpful contribution was a suggestion by Cindy Vestuti, the RISD artist who was Siskind’s caretaker until his death in 1996. Why not include the work of students and artist friends influenced by the photographer? "He encouraged his students to think for themselves and experiment," Grinnell said. "That’s taken a lot of them in different directions." She was speaking at the museum on the November 1 opening night of the show, surrounded by half a hundred photographs of Siskind’s, as well as his echoes in many works of others. No one has been more influenced by Siskind than Providence fine art photographer Denny Moers. Four of his works are on display, all of which began as simple black and white photographs. A lone pond, causeway road and two hunched shacks, all were worked on with darkroom chemicals to give further voice to their solitude, with burnt-umber giving weight to a foreground or a gestural black swirl sweeping across a sky. Moers was looking over Siskind’s photographs with Jan Howard, the RISD curator of prints, dawings and photographs who organized the Providence exhibitions. As they looked closely at a wall in one print, Moers remarked that Siskind probably would have preferred even detail on it rather than its murky patches. He should know, having worked through the 1980s in Siskind’s darkroom as his printer. Speaking with them about Siskind produced several insights about the photographer’s approach to his work. For example, that Siskind brought non-visual elements to his images. "He was trained first as a musician and a poet, so from those disciplines he was always looking for something, I think, more abstract, really," Howard said. "More open, more ambiguous, the way those media are. He was looking for a way to see if photography was capable of that kind of expression. I think that was the urge that was pushing him for a long time." Moers expanded on that observation. "Never underestimate him thinking in the language of classical music," he said. "I could never print without chamber music in the darkroom. He was always humming and singing. So I think he thought in terms of that: dissonance, order, relationship, foreground, background, in the same way that music has to — which is pure abstraction." Howard searched her memory for a quote from Siskind about what he wanted to create in an image. She found it: "order with tensions continuing," was how he put it. "A negative was just a place to start, basically, for him," she said. "It wasn’t the same thing that would be printed from time to time." "Which," Moers quickly observed, "was very contradictory to almost all other photographers’ sensibilities — including Harry." He was referring to Harry Callahan, whose work is also on the walls. The more common practice for photographers, Moers said, was to make a master print and then copy that forever. Howard noted that despite Siskind not seeking an ideal interpretation for a print, "he does know certain things about the print that he wants to happen." "But he doesn’t tear up the ‘bad’ ones," Moers added. "He’ll send them out." As informative as any observation in their conversation was how they were now speaking of the absent guest of honor. By this point both of them were talking about Aaron Siskind in the present tense. — B.R

Aaron Siskind died in 1991 at age 87. Long live Aaron Siskind.

The wealth of photographs on display in the local shows celebrating the centenary of his birth, as well as the work of students and artist colleagues he made creative impressions upon, demonstrate just how enduring and pervasive his influence remains. Perhaps more than any other 20th-century artist, he gave permission for photographers to appreciate abstract images in their viewfinders.

Peeling paint has never looked the same.

Aaron Siskind and His Rhode Island Circle, the show at the Newport Art Museum, focuses on this matter of influence intelligently and extensively. In addition to about 50 of his photographs, work is presented by 13 of his students and seven other artists who were close to him.

Sometimes he affected students quite directly. High up on Bunny Harvey’s painting "Marine Leap" (1983), two arcing planes curve into the roiled sea of blues, a straightforward reference to Siskind’s series of leaping divers. Likewise, the two leaping dogs here from Henry Horenstein’s "Canine" series are a delightful homage. Elsewhere in the show, the reference sometimes is less a correspondence to any Siskind photograph than a similarly acute sensibility. The ragged weeds and grasses that Stephen Brigidi shows us were photographed in Hawaii, where he traveled with Siskind. But the images share with Siskind’s lava series of the time mainly a wariness about how harshly impressive nature can be.

The Newport show is quite informative about the many classic works by Siskind on display. We can look at his quasi-calligraphic abstraction "New York 2" (1951), then view it again with the commentary of photographer Carl Chiarenza at our shoulder. He suggests that in the photograph "there is wit, pathos, death and sex, all in a constant stage of metamorphosis," and goes on to specify what elements in the image prompted the observation. The quote on a wall card is from Chiarenza’s 1982 book Aaron Siskind: Pleasures and Terrors.

Two 1973 Siskind photographs from Rome, capturing swaths of white paint on dark walls, are striking examples from his "Homage to Franz Kline" series. The iconic abstract expressionist’s work, whose better known paintings consist of black strokes over white fields, also echo against the adjoining samples from Siskind’s 1986 "Tar" series. Those were taken mostly on Providence’s Waterman Street bridge, composed from patterns of crack-filler against the coarse asphalt texture, but they might as well have been created with a thick ink brush on rice paper for all their brisk authority.

The image selected for the catalogue cover of the main RISD Museum show, Interior Drama: Aaron Siskind’s Photographs of the 1940s, sums up the artist’s contributions economically. A soiled canvas work glove on a dirty wood plank, from his 1944 "Gloucester" series, is several things at once: texturally lush; ordinarily overlooked, here respected by the noticing; compositionally precise, so that any change would lessen the impression; all but animate as the narrowing at the cuff makes it seem to reach out to us. Et cetera.

Perhaps the show’s main contribution to appreciators of Siskind is how it clarifies his successful departure from documentary photography. The wall text quotes him saying in 1963 that "I wasn’t made for it, really," that he wasn’t capturing "anything really personal, anything really powerful." Then the exhibition presents representative examples from the 1930s and ’40s, well-received images of Harlem residents, tenement façades, and building ruins. We can see in these selections what Siskind later commented on himself, that in these early pictures he was more interested in formal qualities of compositional and tonal tensions than in their social content. His close-up of the head of a black boy makes its geometry and texture the real subject. Likewise, in his "Tabernacle City" series of architectural photographs, he frequently closes in on a building to frame some rectilinear balance or the interplay between areas in shadow and light.

The photographs are grouped by time period and series project, so we get to appreciate many variations on his best themes. There are stone walls from Martha’s Vineyard in the 1950s, as well as earlier fascinations with isolating beach detritus there. But most importantly we get scores of images that establish his kinship with the esthetic and approach of the post-war abstract expressionists who, after being disillusioned with social idealism, searched inward and then ventured outward again. In endless theme and variation, Siskind connected his inner states with the outwardly observable. The peeling paint in his famous image "Jerome, Arizona 21" (1949) is surrounded by numerous similar examinations — of stained walls indoors and out, of sections of broken windows, of graffiti and poster calligraphy fragments, of random slashings of paint on walls — that his noticing and framing makes as celebratory as anything in the next room by his hero Franz Kline.

THROUGH JANUARY 11 at the RISD Museum of Art, Interior Drama: Aaron Siskind’s Photographs of the 1940s, looking back to the decade when Siskind’s work shifted away from documenting social issues in New York to making abstract, metaphorical photographs that were the foundation of the rest of his oeuvre. Some one hundred photographs give special emphasis to Siskind’s interests in the ideas of the surrealists during his transitional period and include many photographs not exhibited for decades. A catalogue accompanies the show.

Through January 18 at the RISD Museum, a small installation of Siskind’s later photographs is being shown in the Works on Paper Gallery.

Through January 18 at the Newport Art Museum, Aaron Siskind and His Rhode Island Circle, some 50 photographs by Siskind, plus work by photographers and other artists he influenced, and by more than a dozen students of his.

Through January 25 at RISD, The New York School: Aaron Siskind in Context, presenting work done by some of the painters of the New York School in the 1940s and ’50s, which attempt to express psychological content. The works connect Siskind’s photography to such artists, as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

Through January 25 at RISD, Aaron Siskind: From Chicago to Providence, 1951-91, a look at Siskind’s later work. Included are photographs from "Pleasures and Terrors," a series of divers shot at Lake Michigan in Chicago in the 1950s, and the Tar Series, gestural abstract images of tar patterns taken in Providence in the 1980s.