05 Dec Telluride Gallery of Fine Art: Dan Budnik, 12/10
Right after WWII, New York City, no longer Paris, became the center of the art world, and a (largely) boy’s club known as the Abstract Expressionists became superstars. Arguably the most famous member of the group was Jackson Pollack, whose explosive energy best sums up a movement that was all about the act of painting.
Willem De Kooning
Rothko was in that elite fraternity of painters and sculptors too, so were Willem De Kooning, Jasper Johns, Phillip Guston, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, David Smith, and Barnett Newman.
Among the very few women in the group, Louise Nevelson developed a reputation for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. Her innovative environments – and success within the male-dominated realm of the New York gallery system – inspired many younger (especially female) artists, as did the work of another installation sculptor, Louise Bourgeois.
Louise Nevelson
Louise Bourgeois
And photojournalist Dan Budnik (b. 1933, Long Island, NY), a heavyweight champion of portraiture, was on hand to capture those superstars in action. His images consistently convey emotional depth, striking a delicate balance between fine art and frank humanity.
A show of Dan Budnik’s work at the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art opens Thursday, December 10, 5 – 8 p.m., in concert with a holiday edition of Telluride Arts First Thursday Art Walk, when over 20 venues all over Telluride showcase local, regional, and national talent. The event at the Gallery includes a reception for the photographer. On display are 30 rare images of artists in their studios from the 1950s, when ABExers dominated. But Budnik continued to shoot through the 1970s, engaging portraits of world-famous Pop artists and Color Field painters too.
“Dan Budnik’s portraits of fine artists intrigued me. I became motivated to dig deeper into their work and learn more about art history,” said Baerbel Hacke, director, Telluride Gallery of Fine Art.
Jasper Johns
Dan Budnik is no stranger to Telluride. In years past, the Gallery has mounted shows featuring his extraordinary perspective on the Civil Rights movement. Those images date back to the early 1950s, when he was a student at the Art Students’ League in New York.
“I was on my way to Paris to study with Cartier Bresson’s teacher Andre Lhote, but first I had to stop in New York to get a passport. The bureaucrats wouldn’t give me the document without a letter from my draft board, because of America’s so-called ‘involvement’ in Korea. (We were not yet officially at war.) Frustrated at being denied, I kicked a can up 57th Street. The can landed in front of the Art Student’s League. The next morning I signed up for classes,” Budnik explained.
Ellsworth Kelly
Budnik was standing right behind Martin Luther King in Washington, D.C. when King delivered his iconic ‘I Have A Dream” speech.
“Marching to the Freedom Dream” was published in August 2014. The book focuses on Budnik’s images of the three seminal Civil Rights marches that took place between 1958 and 1965. Its publication coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and preceded the 50th anniversaries of the Selma-Montgomery March and the Voting Rights Act of 2015.
In 1957, Budnik started working at Magnum Photos in New York, assisting several photographers, notably Cornell Capa, Burt Glinn, Eve Arnold, Ernst Haas, Eric Hartmann, and Elliott Erwitt. In March 1958, he travelled to live with the underground in Havana for six weeks during the Cuban Revolution.
In 1963, Budnik joined Magnum as an associate member. In 1964, he left the company, but continued to specialize in essays for leading national and international magazines, focussing on civil and human rights, ecological issues – and artists.
Georgia O’Keefe
Since 1970, Dan Budnik has worked with the Hopi and Navaho traditional people of northern Arizona. For those initiatives, he received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1973 and a Polaroid Foundation Grant in 1980.
In 1998, Budnik became the recipient of the Honor Roll Award of the American Society of Media Photographers.
Dan Budnik was also a close friend of the iconic artist Georgia O’Keefe and one of her last guests at her world-famous Ghost Ranch near Sante Fe, New Mexico. There he shot penetrating portraits of the extraordinary woman and artist who became known as the “Mother of American Modernism.”
Dan Budnik now lives and works in Tucson and Flagstaff, Arizona.
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