Suspend your skepticism for a few minutes, while I relate an art-world story I found both hard-to-believe and irresistible. It’s about a photographer named Robert Bergman, who — at age 65, never having sold a work until two ago, never even having found a gallery — is about to have two museum shows. One opens next week at the National Gallery of Art; the other opens on Oct. 25 at P.S. 1 in Queens.
As I write in an article about Bergman, which is published in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal (here), his works are unlike most photography of the last half-century, but he says he never wavered from his own vision. How Bergman ignored art world trends, fought demoralization, weathered near-poverty and then triumphed this way, his way — well, it would be nice if this happened more often.
Bergman ultimately broke into the art world by appealing to critics, like Meyer Schapiro and John Russell, who were more interested in painting than prevailing trends in photography. As Bergman tells it, he went to people who had an eye. (Very early on, btw, he showed his work to and found support from Sam Sachs, the former director of the Frick Collection, among other things, who then was head of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.)
The works that will go on display, as I wrote, “were shot from the mid-1980s to about 1996. They are intense, soul-stirring, intimate color portraits, all untitled, all unlabeled as to place or person: There’s just a date and a few technical details. Stripped of information, the viewer is forced to consider the human condition.”
The photographs are not staged, and — well, I hope you’ll read the WSJ article, where I explain much more. Right now, I have an exclusive on Bergman. But I suspect we’ll be hearing more about him.
Bergman has had some patronage over the years, and I would be happy to name them, except that, he says, they wish to remain anonymous.
Photo Credits: © Robert Bergman, Courtesy National Gallery of Art