Lincoln Center: Celebrating 50 Years

New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, America’s leading multi-arts complex, has had a remarkable half-century of existence, as seen in the exhibition Lincoln Center: Celebrating 50 Years, which tracked the center’s life from planning and construction through the many music, theater, dance, film, and opera productions that have taken place since its opening.

Photographs made up the bulk of the show, including dozens of performance shots from five decades of presentations. All those elaborate stage sets and ranks of opera singers! Dancers, choreographers, actors! Orchestras, jazz ensembles, choruses! All those iconic shots of authoritative men in tuxedos — Pierre Boulez, James Levine, Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur, Lorin Maazel — wielding batons like tiny but potent wands of power! As a historical record, the exhibition was an impressive visual collection of world-class performing-arts productions: very “official history.” As individual photographs, the images were of mostly anecdotal interest, with potentially greater meaning to habitual Lincoln Center performance-goers than to the casual viewer.

The more interesting photographs, however, were those of art in progress, rather than the creative product posed and frozen for the record. Take those of Leonard Bernstein — a different conductor-animal altogether to judge by the images of him (he was allotted a special area in the gallery). One shot shows the maestro conducting in a plaid shirt and sport coat, caught in expansive mid-gesture with open mouth and extended, expressive hands (no baton), conjuring sound from the void surrounding him. You can see the invisible energy fi eld in and around the man. The photograph, by Walter Strate Studio, captures a working-artist reality that is far more captivating than the idealized looks of conductors seen in more “official” depictions.

In another, similarly engaging picture, George Balanchine in shirtsleeves is leaning to his left in mid-dance-step, arms wide, while next to him, moving in unison, is Jerome Robbins. It’s apparently a light moment between the two famously intense choreographers — Balanchine is almost laughing, the notoriously saturnine (and competitive) Robbins is almost smiling. They could be doing the hokey-pokey if we didn’t know this was a Lincoln Center rehearsal hall. Shot by Frank Stewart, it’s a deceptively cool and altogether lovely moment that conveys the unexpected, sometimes playful essence of art-making that has gone on behind Lincoln Center’s staid marble walls. This photograph tells you something as important about dance at New York City Ballet as those formal portraits capturing the cast, costumes, and stage sets for productions that are also on display in this show.

One of the most compelling photographs was even more blatantly candid, almost a throwaway. A 1991 shot by Henry Grossman shows Robin Williams and Isaac Stern in academic gowns, offstage and waiting to receive awards, caught in post-shtick hilarity: comedian Williams has a smugly pleased expression while Stern, the great violinist, is wiping away tears of laughter. I would have liked to have known more about the story behind that one.

And I think that is the story here: fifty years on, what stops the eye in Lincoln Center’s mostly formal retrospective are the photographs of the unguarded personalities, the casual incidents, the creativity caught in motion. Institutional history is made of — and made more interesting by — these moments, too.