Nathan Lerner and Maxwell Street

Abstract

Men sit idly in a vacant lot, beside a stack of pipes, in front of frayed advertising posters clinging to a brick wall. Men rest on break beside their shovels, a poster behind them showing a black waiter bringing a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon to his rich customer, proclaiming These Sho Am Quality Folks. A blind, black, blues guitarist blows a kazoo in the 1936 Maxwell Street marketplace. An older white man plays a jerry-rigged fiddle while a teenage girl, presumably his daughter, accompanies him on guitar. A Gypsy girl holds a child. The child looks with fear at a frightening parade mask in the right foreground, while the girl looks calmly into the camera's eye. A slumped man sleeps on his hand in a doorway beside a curved pipe. A large man in a spotted coat, cigarette dangling pugnaciously from the corner of his mouth.... Plucked chickens hang in a shop window. Headless manikins crowd shop window, waiting for cover. A pile of second hand shoes.... Children by the number, isolated or together: - three sit on the running board of a car, two black and one white, the white girl sucking on a piece of vacuum hose; - a black shoeshine boy protects an automobile; - a beautiful black girl looks hopefully, expectantly, into the eye of the camera; - a beautiful black boy with a wistful gaze that betrays no shame of poverty; Nina, a gypsy girl, coolly assays the camera; - Nina's cousin, charming in 3/4 profile with a saucy look; - charming girl's brother, a boy in overalls and a loose-fitting coat, his huge hands in tight balls, a nervous smile and glinting eyes making the scene explode in some wild, cosmic laugh.... Nathan Lerner's Chicago: pictures taken in 1936-37, vivid black and whites done with stunning clarity by a young artist in his early twenties, a neighbor of Chicago's open-air Maxwell Street market, and a chronicler of its place in time. Poverty plagued the United States in the 1930s, but its pervasiveness offered a sense of national sharing. The richness of this life was captured by Nathan Lerner's camera - Jews, Gentiles, Eastern Europeans straggling in a new land, poor blacks up from cotton country, Gypsies, older workers beaten by lack of jobs and money, children hopeful in spite of their lack of privilege, shabby objects of a local market situated in stark relief. This juxtaposition of people and objects shows the vision of an artist in sympathy with his subjects. Move forward almost sixty years, and Maxwell Street is still shabby, but the marketplace traffics with less diversity, more despair, its original site now absorbed by a large, urban university, and the open-air market has been transferred to a side street beside railway tracks. I go to the exhibit of Nathan Lerner's photographs at the University of Iowa's Art Museum a number of times - can't get the images out of my mind. I understand enough of the visual arts - the use of compositional design, juxtaposition, and irony - to know these photographs as the works of a budding artist. A promotion tells me that Nathan Lerner later became one of the leading exponents of Chicago's Bauhaus school, and though I don't exactly know what that means, I know it signifies reputation, important in art as well as in life. But it's not art for art's sake that draws me to the exhibit. It's the people in the pictures, the way they have been captured - no!, the way they continue to live beyond the static images, their open faces showing so much of their selves and souls. One evening, a month into the exhibit, I attend a reading given by Ira Berkow, esteemed sports editor of the New York Times, concerning the history of Maxwell Street, and how it's dissolving into something else, another celebration of America as a land of hope and opportunity that is now only an empty landmark. At Berkow's reading, the master of ceremonies introduces the now 80-year-old Nathan Lerner, a compact man in a brown suit, with a trimmed goatee and the bearings of a careful, cautious, well-composed artist. …