An American in Europe:
The Photography Collection of Baroness Jeane von Oppenheim from the Norton Museum of Art

Frye Art Museum, 622-9250.
Through June 16.

I'm sure I already knew that every collection is a portrait of the collector, but I hadn't ever felt it in my bones until I saw the collection assembled by Baroness Jeane von Oppenheim. You can know this, and then you can be thrilled by it; these are two different things.

In this collection, you watch an expatriate familiarize herself with her new country by admiring and acquiring, over time, a splendid collection of works by its photographers. The baroness, born in New York and married 40 years ago into the German banking family, is like one of those Americans in Europe whose condition Henry James understood so well--both at home and not, fitting in and looking out. In a Robert Mapplethorpe portrait of the baroness, stationed at the entrance to the exhibition, she is both formidable and vulnerable, with an impeccable helmet of hair, hands posed like a pope's, and a power suit that both protects and overwhelms her.

These dueling characteristics are at work in her collection: considerable power applied to digesting an unfamiliar world, strength applied to (perceived) weakness. You can very nearly feel her intense focus shift from realm to realm, from human to object, from August Sanders' portraits of ordinary Germans (his life's work, never completed, was to create an atlas of all humanity) to Candida Höfer's empty public spaces, to Lucia Moholy's devastating portraits of brilliant men.

Many of these works present themselves, with the benefit of retrospect, as dares to the very idea of knowledge: Moholy's portrait of Walter Gropius--starkly cropped so that not much more is revealed than his large head framed by his hands--seems to invite intimacy because of its scale, but then repels it because of the sitter's ambiguous gesture.

The influential Bechers, Bernd and Hilla (whose school in Düsseldorf has produced more than a handful of excellent contemporary photographers), produce works that are similarly plain and similarly deceptive. There's a series of images of houses, both whole villages and small clusters, that are certainly real but somehow have the feel of tiny little props for a train set. The water towers that obsess the Bechers, on the other hand, are monumental, and the dissonance between the reductive impulse on the one hand and the magnifying on the other reminds one of the shifting perspectives that assault the traveler in a new country. Their student Boris Becker intensifies this perceptive jolt in one of the exhibition's few color images: the Cologne cathedral under renovation, with a blue tarp, relatively tiny, giving the imposing façade an unexpected fragility.

I never much liked Karl Blossfeldt's close-up images of plant life--probably I've seen them on too many greeting cards--but here they acquire a scientific pace, much like Sanders', that speaks to the diligence of the collector. The same is true for Dr. Paul Wolff's advertising-style images: not so spectacular on their own, but here a type, as useful as a limb.

The postmodern speculation about whether or not what you see is what you see is absent from this collection. Even the Surrealism-influenced work--Florence Henri's still lifes of fruit and mirrors reflecting other fruit--is quite clear about what's in front of you; the emphasis is on the strangeness of real life. The baroness, in an essay for the exhibition catalogue, writes, "One observes [in a photograph] a split second of time, but sees the complete truth," and goes on to clarify, "that is, before the invention of digital photography." The fact that photography's truth content was in question long before digital manipulation, back (to pull out a random example) to when dead children were shown in final portraits as peacefully sleeping, isn't useful to the baroness' project, and frankly, I didn't miss the (by now, quite tired) inquiry into it.

You can look and look and look, at your own world or at a foreign one, and still not know it completely. The world resists being known, after all, no matter how much work you do. Which, far from making the baroness' collection feel futile, makes it feel brave and striving and rigorous. It makes it feel, I daresay, very American.