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 in 1935. Between 1934 and 1939, he traveled to Paris,

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 ...

making photographs mostly of city streets and experimenting with short 16mm films. While stationed in Trinidad in the Signal Corps from 1941-1944, he filmed the island's residents. In 1947, he joined the Photo League 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, pointill ...

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 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 Unite ...

*September 23, 2008 – January 4, 2009 "New York, N. Why? Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, 1937–1940" at Metropolitan Museum of Art *May 9 – July 15, 2000 "Rudy Burckhardt and Friends: New York Artists of the 1950s and '60s" at New York University

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's Decker Library, Internet Archive
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