Rudy Burckhardt (April 6, 1914 – August 1, 1999) was a Swiss-American filmmaker, and photographer, known for his photographs of the hand-painted billboards that began to dominate the American landscape in the 1940s and 1950s.

Life

Burckhardt was a member of the Swiss patrician

Burckhardt Burckhardt, or (de) Bourcard in French, is a family of the Basel patriciate, descended from Christoph (Stoffel) Burckhardt (1490–1578), a merchant in cloth and silk originally from Münstertal, Black Forest, who received Basel citizenship i ...

family. He discovered photography as a medical student in London. He left medicine to pursue photography in the 1930s. He immigrated to

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

in 1935. Between 1934 and 1939, he traveled to

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. Si ...

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

and

Haiti Haiti (; ht, Ayiti ; French: ), officially the Republic of Haiti (); ) and formerly known as Hayti, is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean Sea, east of Cuba and Jamaica, and s ...

making photographs mostly of city streets and experimenting with short 16mm films. While stationed in

Trinidad Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands of Trinidad and Tobago. The island lies off the northeastern coast of Venezuela and sits on the continental shelf of South America. It is often referred to as the southernmos ...

in the Signal Corps from 1941-1944, he filmed the island's residents. In 1947, he joined the

Photo League The Photo League was a cooperative of photographers in New York who banded together around a range of common social and creative causes. Founded in 1936, the League included some of the most noted American photographers of the mid-20th century amon ...

in New York City. Burckhardt married painter

Yvonne Jacquette Yvonne Jacquette (born 1934) is an American painter and printmaker known in particular for her depictions of aerial landscapes, especially her low-altitude and oblique aerial views of cities or towns, often painted using a distinctive, pointil ...

whom he collaborated with throughout their 40-year marriage. During the mid-Fifties he worked with Joseph Cornell on "The Aviary", "Nymphlight", "A Fable For Fountains", and "What Mozart Saw On Mulberry Street". He taught filmmaking and painting at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest- ...

from 1967 to 1975. He is the great-uncle of author Andreas Burckhardt. Burckhardt committed suicide by drowning in the lake on his property.

Exhibitions (selection)

*October 25, 2014 - February 15, 2015 "Rudy Burckhardt – In the Jungle of the Big City" at *November 4, 2011 - March 25, 2012 "The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951" at

Jewish Museum (New York) The Jewish Museum is an art museum and repository of cultural artifacts, housed at 1109 Fifth Avenue, in the former Felix M. Warburg House, along Museum Mile on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City. The first Jewish museum in the Unit ...

*September 23, 2008 – January 4, 2009 "New York, N. Why? Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, 1937–1940" at

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

*May 9 – July 15, 2000 "Rudy Burckhardt and Friends: New York Artists of the 1950s and '60s" at

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, th ...

References

External links

"The Cinema of Looking"
''Jacket 21'' *http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/b/rudy_burckhardt/index.html *http://www.film-makerscoop.com/search/search.php?author=Rudolph+Burckhardt *http://www.milkmag.org/burckhardt%20page.htm *http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2002/burckhardt/ *http://www.tibordenagy.com/artists/rudy-burckhardt/Burckhardt * * Audio recording of Rudy Burckhardt Lecture, 1992, from

Maryland Institute College of Art The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) is a Private university, private art school, art and design college in Baltimore, Maryland. It was founded in 1826 as the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, making it one of t ...

's Decker Library,

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

Copyright permissions for Rudy Burckhardt
from the WATCH File {{DEFAULTSORT:Burckhardt, Rudy 1914 births 1999 deaths 1999 suicides Swiss emigrants to the United States 20th-century American photographers People from Basel-Stadt American filmmakers People from Searsmont, Maine Rudy Suicides by drowning in the United States Suicides in Maine