The New York Studio School is thrilled to screen three films by filmmaker and photographer Rudy Burckhardt: Neil Welliver Painting in Maine (1980), Yvonne Jacquette Painting Autumn Expansion (1981), and Alex Katz Painting (1978). Rudy Burckhardt captures three close associates (two friends and his wife) working and describing their process in an intimate and informal way. After the screening, Rudy Burckhardt’s son and artist, Tom Burckhardt, will be available for a Q+A.
In 1914 Rudolph Burckhardt was born in Basel to a notable Swiss family. From an early age, Rudy was encouraged to study medicine. However with the discovery of photography and a new friendship with the writer and poet Edwin Denby, Burckhardt’s life changed course. He immigrated to New York City in 1935. During the 1930s and 1940s he traveled, photographed and filmed much of the American South, the Caribbean and Europe. Over the years Rudy fostered friendships with many key figures of the New York art scene such as Willem de Kooning, Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher, Red Grooms and Jackson Pollock. Rudy collaborated with many artists on his various films such as Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, Larry Rivers, Yvonne Jacquette, John Ashbery, Jane Freilicher, and Edwin Denby. Later in life Burckhardt married the painter Yvonne Jacquette. Amongst their collaborations, is their son; contemporary artist Tom Burckhardt.
The work of Rudy Burckhardt has been extensively exhibited in galleries and museums both nationally and internationally in such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria, Fotostiftung Schweitz, Winterthur, Switzerland and the Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland. Many of his works are now in these permanent collections. Given the breadth of Rudy’s documentation of New York City and its artists, Burckhardt’s photographs have been reproduced hundreds of times for commercial and academic purposes.
Tom Burckhardt was born in New York City in 1964 and has spent his entire life living there. He graduated with a BFA in painting from SUNY Purchase in 1986 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture that same year. He has been exhibiting since 1992 at various NYC galleries such as High Noon Gallery, George Adams Gallery, Tibor De Nagy Gallery, Pierogi and Caren Golden Fine Art, and the Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco, CA.
His most recent solo show of paintings was at High Noon Gallery NYC Sept 5- Oct 25, 2025. He participated in the 2016 Kochi Muziris Bienalle in Kerala, India and that installation piece,“Studio Flood” was shown at the Pierogi Gallery, NYC in September 2017 and CMCA in Maine during Summer 2018. Tom Burckhardt was an artist in residence at Yaddo Foundation in New York State in March 2024 and January 2019, at Pepper House, Kochi, India, in January 2020, and at MacDowell in December 2025. He was a resident faculty at Skowhegan in 2007 and currently teaches part time at SUNY Purchase.
