The Art of Frederick Sommer: Photography, Drawing, Collage
Starred Review. The art of Frederick Sommer isn't about beauty, technique or influence; it is, Davis writes in his curatorial essay, about "understanding... everything." This new survey of the former landscape architect's drawings, collage and photography goes a long way toward illustrating Davis's claim. Sommer emerges here as an insatiable synthesizer who saved, for example, a piece of molten metal he discovered in the 1940s until he could collage it with the ideal background in 1966. The photograph produced from this collage, Davis explains, uncannily evokes the composition of a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. To help readers understand the impulses driving Sommer, Davis's essay lingers on the surrealist technique of "skipreading" whereby one "reinterprets important texts by rapidly scanning the page to form a new, poetic narrative from intuitively chosen words and phrases." Sommer used this technique to produce wonderfully aphoristic texts, some of which are interspersed, to great effect, throughout this catalog of images. Davis sets out to demonstrate that the whole of Sommer's work and, by extension, his life was a grand act of skipreading. It's an exciting, if not heroic, take on Sommer's process, suggesting that the nearly two decades that elapsed between finding the molten metal and its complimentary background, for example, collectively formed the "important text" from which Sommer would intuitively choose detritus to recombine into startling images. The book's sequencing of images wholly succeeds in creating a powerful contemplative experience, and the enticing arguments Davis offers in his introductory remarks incite a hunger for fresh, detailed scholarship about each of Sommer's works.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.