Robert Frank Forged a New Beauty Out of Grief and Fury

You remember Robert Frank from those old “pitchers,” “The Americans” (1958)—the series of death-glares and funereal jukeboxes that influenced everyone and their mother. As Jack Keroauc wrote in his introduction to the canonical book: “Anybody doesnt like these pitchers don’t like potry, see?”

“The Americans” showed that a pretty picture was not the best picture. Now, Frank’s poetry bank refreshes, thanks to the stupendous retrospective of his later, post-1958 work, “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Astonishingly, it is Frank’s first solo exhibition at MoMA. Here, we see Frank forge, out of seemingly insurmountable grief and fury, a wild-grass beauty. For Frank, reality is at a loss, always will be.

Words and images, together, helped Frank survive. In 1974, Frank’s daughter Andrea, age 20, was killed in a plane crash in Guatemala. He planned to make a movie based on footage he took of Andrea right before she died, but the developed film was lost by the US postal service. Around the same time, his son Pablo started to show signs of schizophrenia; Pablo was institutionalized, eventually taking his own life in 1994. During this period of unimaginable loss, Frank turned inward. This foreign-to-himself man moved from Manhattan bustle to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, land of the poet Elizabeth Bishop, who taught us in 1976 that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” that “so many things seemed filled with the intent to be lost/that their loss is no disaster.”

Film-Man Frank knew that we define ourselves by lack, that loss recycles. Real disaster would be an inability to work through the disastrous. He, lucky man, could. He had eyes. Keroauc-blessed, even: “To Robert Frank I now give this message: you got eyes.” Eyes, and drive.

In a review of this show for the New York Times, Arthur Lubow had the provincial temerity to claim that Frank’s “genius as a photographer did not carry over to filmmaking.” But how can this be, when everything Frank did was a movie? Whether the image was still or moving, Frank thought with and through film by organizing his practice, as early as “The Americans,” around the principle of montage: this, plus that, makes a fresh other. Anybody doesnt like these pitchers don’t like sin-ma, see?

It was Pull My Daisy (1959), his and Alfred Leslie’s improvised, cock-eyed film of Beat life narrated by Jack Kerouac and starring a young Delphine Seyrig, that made Jonas Mekas realize cinema outside the standards of Hollywood was possible in the United States. Mekas wrote in his Village Voice column that Pull My Daisy “had a visual beauty and truth that is completely lacking in recent American and European films” and that it “pointed towards new directions, new ways out of the frozen officialdom and midcentury senility of our arts.” Voilà: Sixty-five years and an Anthology Film Archives later, we are still reckoning with this glimpse into a new future of perception.

For Frank, working meant being in good company—and cinema was the way to be with beloveds. Once he wrote, “since being a film maker I have become more of a person. I am confident that I can synchronize my thoughts to the image, and that the image will talk back—well, it’s like being among friends.” Intimates feature in many of his photos. Painters who inspired him: Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline. Writers like Kerouac. In one scene, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Kansas City (1966), the poet and his partner snuggle on a coverless mattress, asleep, barely illumined by an orb of morning light. Tenderness reigns, but so does the eerie feeling that all these beloveds only now exist as traces of light.

But Frank was more the scratchy handwriting type, prone to splotch—not one to weep, let alone for long. He used photographs as stationary paper, and he loved wood. In Cape Breton, he split wood. He built a barn out of this wood. He lived for the split. On a picture of Robert Frank splitting wood, Robert Frank wrote: “I like the outdoors—splitting wood—building—digging. In NYC the past haunts me hurts me but I live with a good good woman and we have fun.” Clear words. On the clothesline where he dried slacks, he also dried photographs bearing a single word: WORDS. Then he took a picture of that, doubled it, tripled it, and made it work.

Robert Frank’s story, as shown at MoMA, is the struggle between a past that has never been overcome (a chambre verte of loves), and a future that has not yet arrived (the poetic new world they all desire). Montage. History.