Duane Michals/DC Moore Gallery, New YorkDuane Michals: The Illuminated Man, 1968

Months before he turns eighty-eight, the photographer Duane Michals is in the full throes of a remarkable old-age efflorescence. Evidence to that effect fairly leaps off the brightly colored walls of his fascinating new exhibition, Illusions of the Photographer, at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Michals has long been renowned for three great innovations: his hauntingly atmospheric, teasingly Surrealistic, almost cinematic sequences of pictorial narratives; his use of handwritten texts on small-scale black-and-white silver gelatin prints (the antithesis of the current rage for billboard-sized digitized color images); and his celebratory normalization of homoerotic male beauty, years before Robert Mapplethorpes freak-show fetishism and Bruce Webers consumer-culture beefcake. Yet, unlike artists who hit upon a commercially lucrative formula and then crank out endless fungible reiterations, Michals is something of a superannuated Huck Finn, an incorrigibly subversive and inimitably American scamp always lighting out for new creative territories.

It took me nearly an hour and a half to work my way through the single large gallery in which Michals and the Morgans astute photography curator, Joel Smith, have assembled nearly a hundred works by him and other artists (including Carlo Galli Bibiena, William Blake, and Egon Schiele, as well as the photographers Lewis Carroll, Eugne Atget, and Irving Penn), along with literary artifacts such as Voltaires red leather portfolio, Goethes quill pen, and an origami-like paper boat folded by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in a kaleidoscopic mash-up that is part mini-retrospective and part artists choice survey. The latter format has become increasingly popular at museums with deep storage that can be raided for neglected holdings to illuminate the guest artists own body of work. Here, Smith combed through the Morgans quarter of a million objects and discovered an array of treasures that perfectly resonate with Michalss quirky sensibility. The photographer in turn made the final selection, and even added items from his personal collection, including Victorian illustrated childrens books of the sort that beguiled the Surrealists. The collaborators then grouped their finds under ten rubrics that reflect the subjects major concerns: Death, Illusion, Image and Word, Immortality, Love and Desire, Nature, Playtime, Reflection, Theater, and Time.

Among the many surprises are sixteen short color films (with running times from under two to over twelve minutes) that Michals has produced and directed since 2015, all of which will be screened at the Morgan during the run of the show. They range from a scatological one-liner (Trickle Down, 2018, in which Michals urinates on a Rolls Royce, his commentary on conspicuous consumption) and a tense domestic drama (Interruptus, 2018, features a women walking in on her husband as he puts the moves on another man), and from topical political protest (Deport Trump, 2016) to an enigmatic fantasy that blends Commedia dellArte, Cocteau, and Sixties psychedelia (YORT, 2019). Also on view are several other late-life Michals enthusiasms, including the anonymous nineteenth-century tintypes that he overpaints with abstract motifs inspired by his favorite modern art movement, Cubism. There are also examples of his postmillennial fan-shaped color photos inspired by nineteenth-century Japonisme and epitomized by a lyrical quartet of views of his upstate New York garden in all four seasons.

I came away from this physically compactyet psychically enlargingdisplay with a feeling of utter exhilaration that I havent often had in recent years of gallery going. It also occurred to me, after this latest time-out-of-mind immersion in the personal universe that the photography critic Andy Grundberg has called Duanes World that Michals might be best described as a magusa sorcerer who uses means beyond our ken to explain mysteries of existence that normally elude us.

Always industrious, Michals has been especially productive since the death, two years ago, of his life partner, the architect Fred Gorre, with whom hed lived since 1960 and married in 2011. Gorre suffered from Alzheimers and Parkinsons Disease during his last seven years, when the photographer attentively cared for him in their townhouse in the Gramercy Park neighborhood. Michalswho, like writers including Joan Didion and Nora Ephron, considers everything that happens to him potential subject mattercollected Gorres random utterances during his dementia and included some of them in his 2014 book ABCDuane: A Duane Michals Primer. Those pronouncements could be as Surrealistic as some of Michalss photographyI wonder what Marco Polos doing now?or like rays of light piercing through a dense cloud cover, as when Gorre suddenly declared, Why are we here? To help each other. Whether Michalss new burst of creative energy is attributable to losing himself in cathartic activity after his bereavementa not uncommon and often effective remedy for griefor perhaps because of an increased sense that times wingd chariot is bearing down on him I do not know, but it is inspiring to witness such renewed vigor at his age, whatever the reason.

As a child of the Great Depressionhe grew up just outside Pittsburgh, where his father was a steelworker and his mother a salesclerkMichals has always had a strong work ethic and was never ashamed to accept commercial assignments that have funded his parallel art career. Although the Morgan exhibition includes no examples of his advertising images (which were always unattributed on the page, unlike the present-day practice of naming celebrity photographers), it could have incorporated them without any taint of the marketplace. Still implanted in my minds eye is the breathtaking double-page-spread he did in 1991 for the launch of Este Lauders latest perfume, Spellbound. His tight black-and-white head shot of a man and a woman facing each other in profile has the iconic power of the legendary cinematographer Sven Nykvists very similar use of black and white close-ups in Ingmar Bergmans psychological drama Persona (1966). There is no need to apologize for work of this quality, and indeed when some self-righteous young photographer rudely told him, Ill never sell out, Michals coolly replied, Youve got nothing to sell.

The spheres of commerce and art have intersected for Michals when, for example, hes been commissioned to photograph cultural luminaries because of his uncanny ability to capture an aura of their work through his insightful portraits of the artists. This was never more evident than in his justly celebrated 1965 series on Rn Magritte, at home in Brussels. The shoot occasioned an unforgettable channeling of the Belgian masters spirit through a double exposure image of the bowler-hatted artist sitting in front of a blank canvas and appearing to simultaneously morph into the picture plane and vanish from the room. Im hard-pressed to name any other photograph of an artist more evocative than this one.

Magritte tops Michalss personal artistic pantheon (along with [t]hree people I met [who] intimidated me to the point of being speechless: Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Frank, and Saul Steinberg), as he tells Smith in their uncommonly informative catalog interview. Their probing interchange also offers a great deal of otherwise fresh personal information about its subject, who, though hardly closeted by any possible definition, has always been extremely discreet about his private life, in the same way that countless other high-achieving gay men in the postwar New York art and design world were. Yet it comes as news when he talks to Smith about the invariably beautiful young men whom he recruited for his art photography over the years and admits that, I got involved with my modelsI fell in love with my modelsbut my models were always straight.

Although death and immortality are recurrent motifs in Michalss artWhenever some magazine does an article on life after death I get a call, he once told mehis increasing defense against actuarial reality is another of his major themes: humor. One wall label in the photographers distinctively rangy pen-and-ink script reads, I decided what I wanted engraved on my tombstone: Having a wonderful time, wish you were here.

Although Michals in old age can be as avuncular as his great avatar Walt Whitmanthe Good Gray Gay Poet (to slightly tweak the famous nickname conferred by Whitmans great friend, William Douglas OConnor)there is also a restless persistence that underlies his explorations into metacognition: thinking about thinking, or knowing about knowing. The conclusion that comes across so clearly in his thought-provoking Illusions of the Photographer is that whatever we know, attempt to know, or cant possibly know, we are all winding up at the same destination. But that inevitability does not dampen this philosophical explorers determination to make some sense of what hes rightly called questions without answersthe Big Things in Lifeand his curiosity and vision remain undaunted and undimmed as he heads toward his tenth decade.

Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan is on view until February 2, 2020. A catalog is published by the Morgan Duane Michals: Mischievous Eye, and an exhibition of Michalss most recent work will be on view at the D.C. Moore Gallery in New York City from November 15 to December 21, 2019.

An earlier version of this article misidentified the Este Lauderperfume advertisement that Duane Michals photographed as Beautiful from 1985. It was Spellbound in 1991.

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The Ceaseless Innovation of Duane Michals | by Martin Filler | NYR Daily - The New York Review of Books