Peter Franks on Ransoming Mathew Brady

Chair as Self-Portrait, 2005, oil on canvas, 62×46 inches

In his latest series of paintings and drawings John Ransom Phillips trains his psychologically keen and historically informed eye on a figure at once central and peripheral to American art, the photographer Matthew Brady.

Reflecting on Brady’s notable but in some regard overrated role in the photographic documentation of the Civil War, as well as his prominence before and after as a New York-based portrait photographer whose clientele was top-heavy in the rich and famous, Phillips teases out the pathos, and the bathos, underlying Brady’s artistic achievement and social persona.

As well, Phillips casts Brady against the figure of Walt Whitman, contrasting the poet’s bold aesthetic and personal gesture against the photographer’s more conventional social role—a role that, nonetheless, Brady’s artistic achievement transcended.
Phillips proffers this dialectic as a quintessentially American problem in art: the bold or the safe? The challenging or the acceptable?
Thoreau or Emerson?
Ives or MacDowell?
Ginsberg or Warhol?

—Peter Frank, Art Critic and Senior Curator for Riverside Art Museum