PHOTOGRAPHY: Bleak Chic

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No matter what else goes on in Richard Avedon's portraits, it is the white backgrounds we remember first. Especially in the 1960s and '70s, when his up- against-the-wall pictures of celebrities and politicians started to appear in quantity, that bare radiance certified them as both aesthetically resolute and bang up-to-the-minute -- like hard-edged Minimalist painting -- and open to all kinds of understandings. Was that the chic white space of fashion magazines we were seeing? The Modernist's realm of purified spirit? The Existentialist's blank slate? Whatever it was, it seemed the mark of some supremely brave and urbane disposition located somewhere between Albert Camus and Diana Vreeland.

Just where exactly has been the crux of the Avedon question ever since. For much of his career, the photographer has been at pains to remind everyone that despite their superabundance of glamour -- and there is something in his style that can make even the grayest, most sinister suits of the Nixon years look swank -- his pictures have far deeper sources and purposes. At 70, with "Evidence: Richard Avedon 1944-1994," the retrospective of his work that opens on March 24 at the Whitney Museum in New York City -- it travels from there to Europe, Minneapolis and Los Angeles -- he is determined to consolidate, once and for all, his reputation as an artist of consequence, in the same league as Bill Brandt or Cartier-Bresson or, for that matter, a painter like Francis Bacon.

Don't imagine that it's easy for Avedon to make his case. While half the world is prepared to tell you he's a genius, the other half is always ready to call him slick. It doesn't necessarily help your reputation as an artist to have made your name doing fashion shoots, to have directed Calvin Klein commercials and to be, as Avedon is now, the first and only staff photographer of the suddenly trend-conscious New Yorker. Not everybody is inclined to entertain claims of seriousness from a man so at home in the counting house of status that is Manhattan, or one whose life has been so glamorous that Hollywood turned it into Funny Face (starring Fred Astaire as "Dick Avery").

So much the worse that when Avedon turned from Chanel gowns to portraits of the battered heroes of high culture and the Chicago Seven, he arrived at a signature look so contemporary -- so crisp and detailed, so coolly impassive and yet so in-your-face before the term was born -- it seemed to say moral seriousness was not only a virtue, it was hip. A sustaining faith in some quarters, that idea has always been anathema to others. Critics on the right called Avedon radical chic; those on the left dismissed him as chic, period.