Unknown Halsman [ハードカバー]

Reconsidering an artist can be an exhausting experience, and therefore one is especially glad when a latterday artist marshals the evidence like a great defense attorney. In this case, our contemporary the young San Francisco-based artist Oliver Halsman Rosenberg spent several years working on the archives of his late grandfather, the once celebrated portrait and fashion photographer Philippe Halsman, and published this very grand and visually exciting book as a brief. I remember Halsman's photographs, the most famous of which appeared in the old LIFE magazine. There was something heavy and European about his style, even when he wore his joker mask. American photographers made less of a fuss, one felt, and Halsman was like the Roberto Benigni of his day, always living large, leaping from chair to chair, exuding geniality like a madman. His collaborations with Salvador Dali's mustache, and people like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor jumping into the air expressing careful exultation, furthered this impression of Halsman as a showman pure and simple, a man for whom statement was understatement: well, he wasn't cool like William Eggleston or whomever.

But now, through OHR's ingenuity, I've changed my mind 180 degrees. The archive has proven a bounty of unusual and sometimes stirring surprises, and most of all I see now that not all of Halsman's photographs were about being goofy (or super somber like his pictures of Einstein and the like). Dali is still all over the volume, but his effect has been relegated to the second tier, so that their collaborative work reveals a Dali influenced by Halsman; it's this new perception of Halsman as top banana that's nothing short of a wake-up call. How about that photo of Mia Farrow, her long hair frizzed in front of her face, resembling nothing so much as a board of knotty pine wood (which she happens to be holding next to her, or peeking from beyond). Visual grammars combine, assert themselves, retreat, while Rosenberg's deliberate confusion of chronology shores up the body of Halsman as a body of infinite gradations.

Rosenberg also brings forward what one might call the camp element. Cocteau in a 1949 LIFE magazine spread makes all his actual work look silly as he himself parades through a corridor of human arms, here sans candelabra but distorted into the hands of little boys pretending to be firing guns. On the flip page, Edward Albee in 1961, and over the top of his skull Halsman slaps on a smorgasbord of tiny actors playing out the most shocking scenes of all of Albee's early one acts. His work is possibly the pivot point where camp turns over and becomes true horror, or at any rate true abjection, the photos of Tippi Hedren and Alfred Hitchcock literalize the dreamy imagery of THE BIRDS into a point of no return, beyond ordinary categories of the sane and the unsane. Rosenberg reminds us of his grandfather's horrible early life, of how he was condemned to solitary confinement for the murder of his own father--a crime of which he was totally innocent, and a punishment meted out by anti-Semitic state forces afraid of the young Latvian and his Jewish convictions. Remember how Dostoevsky was hauled out before a firing squad, and saved only by something completely arbitrary? That's how Halsman lived his whole life, in a state of post-traumatic stress. No wonder he gravitated towards the impossible glamor of Martha Graham, Sharon Tate, and the international conceptualisms of Marcel Duchamp, Isamu Noguchi, Sid Caesar and Cantinflas. That mashup of Mao and Marilyn Monroe stands for me, right now, as his most emblematic work of art.