ART REVIEWS

‘60s Redux: You’re doomed to be dismissed as a dilettante if you establish yourself in another field prior to trying your hand at art. Such is the plight of Graham Nash, the British musician who became a star in the late ‘60s as a member of the rock quartet Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Nash is saddled with a double whammy in that following his stint as a rock star, he made a name for himself as a highly respected collector of photography (Nash parted with his collection last year at Sotheby’s, where it set an auction record with sales totaling $2.4 million).

Nash is presently launching a third career at the G. Ray Hawkins Gallery in Santa Monica, where he makes his Los Angeles debut as a fine-art photographer. Now 49, Nash has been taking photos since he was a teen-ager so he can hardly be called an amateur--technically, he’s more than up to the job. However, with more than half this exhibition given over to portraits of Nash’s famous friends, he runs the risk of being dubbed a celebrity photographer. Art revolving around the famous is a tricky proposition; the media does advance work for art of this genre by creating an interest in a given subject, so when we’re confronted with a picture of a star it’s hard to say whether we’re responding to the photographer’s aesthetic, the mystique of the sitter, or both. This is the murky area where Nash’s art resides.

Nash doesn’t reserve his camera strictly for the famous (this show includes several inventive and whimsical portraits of his family and friends) but his pictures of icons of the late ‘60s definitely steal the show. Stephen Stills, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and David Crosby were leading lights of a ‘60s scene that’s come to be highly romanticized, and in these pictures shot at the very beginning of their careers they have the magical aura of brilliant children. Life had yet to leave it’s mark on them--they seem virginal and blessed. Knowing what lay ahead for some of these people (Crosby and Stills had a particularly hard time of it) invests the pictures with a bittersweet beauty.

Also on view is a series of vintage portraits by Edward S. Curtis, known for his photographs of American Indians shot around the turn of the century. With America jumping up and down over “Dances With Wolves,” these exquisite historical documents of the final flowering of America’s only native spiritual tradition should attract new fans. Seeing Curtis’ pictures again (his work is widely known and frequently exhibited), one is reminded that his style, which centers on an impeccable sense of composition coupled with deep empathy for his subjects, has been adapted by countless photographers who came after him (Irving Penn owes him an especially large debt). However, the thing that really strikes you on encountering these imposing Indian faces is how strange it is that America willfully destroyed this very beautiful part of itself.