A National Gallery show examines Gordon Parks’s early years | The Washington Post

[dropcap]He[/dropcap] was the youngest of his father’s 15 children. He wrote in his high school yearbook that he wanted to be “a general or a Jazz Sheik.”

Gordon Parks fell short of those goals, but in the process of failing, he became a poet, novelist and memoirist; the inventor of a new genre of film; a pianist, composer and librettist; and one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century. How did this happen? [mc4wp_form id=”6042″]

A shout outside a pool hall in Kansas in 1950. (Gordon Parks/The Gordon Parks Foundation) Image Credit.

If you love an artist’s mature work, his or her early work is almost always riveting. The drama is innate: How did it come to be? What were the breakthroughs? Who and what helped? What explains it?

“Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940-1950,” at the National Gallery of Art, sets out to answer these questions. But just as Parks himself got diverted on his way to becoming a “Jazz Sheik,” the curator, Philip Brookman, gets waylaid, and instead of rooting around in juvenilia, finds himself presenting a show with the force and cogency of a full-blown retrospective.