New York Sun: 'Presence,' Glickman Lauder's Glorious Photography Collection Is Up for Two More Weeks at the Portland Museum
Martin Luther King, Ingrid Bergman, Creighton Abrams, and more, in all their glory.
Richard Avedon, 'Audrey Hepburn and Art Buchwald, with Simone D'Aillencourt, Frederick Eberstadt, Barbara Mullen, and Dr. Reginald Kernan, evening dresses by Balmain, Dior, and Patou, Maxim's, Paris, August 1959,' 1959, gelatin silver print, 16 11/16 x 23 5/16 inches. Judy Glickman Lauder Collection, Museum purchase with gift in honor of Judith Glickman Lauder, 2020.7. © The Richard Avedon Foundation
By Seth Lipsky
December 26th, 2022
If you’re headed up to the ski slopes of Maine, don’t pass up the chance to stop at the Portland Museum of Art to catch the last two weeks of the exhibition called “Presence.” It’s the photography collection of Judy Glickman Lauder. It includes 150 photographs by 70 artists and is up through January 15.
We stopped off intending to see the museum’s recent acquisition of one of the major paintings of the legendary painter of the Maine wilderness, Joel Babb. We did see and it didn’t disappoint. It’s a large canvas — called “Gulf Hagas” — of a stream cutting through the forest of Northern Maine, a motif that few, if any, have painted better.
Yet we found ourselves extending our visit to take in the Glickman Lauder collection. It features an eclectic range of photographers — some are anonymous, capturing nameless subjects, others are famed photographers capturing celebrities, such as Richard Avedon’s photo above, of three couples at a bar (that’s humor columnist Art Buchwald, center, making eyes at Audrey Hepburn).
The exhibition spans such photographs as Margaret Bourke-White’s of United States Airship ‘Akron,’ Paul Fusco’s of a family, the five children shirtless, having collected themselves beside the rails of Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train, and Duane Michals’ wry photograph, “Magritte With Hat.”
It also includes Robert Capa’s photograph of Picasso, the artist’s nephew, and Francoise Gilot walking on a French beach while the painter holds an umbrella to shade Gilot from the sun. There is a startling photograph of Frida Kahlo, and an elegant photograph, by Gordon Parks, of Igrid Bergman and a group of nuns.
Most of the photographs in the exhibition are black and white, all of them not only exquisitely composed and shot but also printed and framed. There is a still life, in X-rays, of an arrangement of calla lilies, and a photograph by Edward Steichen of Isadora Duncan, striking a dramatic pose at the Parthenon.
“Presence” includes a powerfully focused closeup of Martin Luther King at Selma by Steve Schapiro and a similarly clear close-up, by Bill Eppridge, of a young Ben Chaney, brother of James Earl Chaney, and their mother at the funeral of the martyred civil rights hero in Mississippi.
Plus, too, the exhibition includes Youssef Karsh’s magnificent photograph of Winston Churchill in full prime ministerial regalia. It is the pose that one can imagine Churchill would have wanted for the parliamentary oil portrait that, years later, was painted by Graham Sutherland only to be rejected by Winnie and, reportedly, burned.
The most arresting photograph, at least to me, in the Glickman Lauder collection is Richard Avedon’s “Mission Council.” It captures the 10 dapper diplomats, led by Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, who ran the American mission in Vietnam. There is, opposite, an Avedon photograph of the Chicago Seven.
At the center of the photo of the Vietnam heroes is the commander of the Military Assistance Command, General Creighton Abrams. The image was captured in 1971, about the time I’d covered a farewell speech that Abrams made to an element of the 25th United States infantry division at Cu Chi.
The speech was one of the most affecting I’ve ever heard, though I was struck at the time that the rumpled commander was out of uniform, a white, rather than olive drab, T-shirt peeking from under his green fatigues. And it did so, too, at the Portland Museum. I raised a friendly salute to them all for their “presence.”