At Jeu de Paume, Robert Frank's The Americans is presented in its entirety, in the order in which Frank specified for the seminal monograph.  It would almost seem like there's hardly any point, then, to slog along in a queue of people to see the work on the wall as the book itself is available for perusal on the benches in the gallery.  However, if you are familiar with the book it might still be worth a second look, as many prints in the series were actually cropped by the editors and didn't exactly follow Frank's specifications, so you have a good chance of encountering something new, or seeing something in a different light. 

The Americans is an incredible entity, a body of work so satisfying in its wholeness as a series and also as a collection of fragmented moments, defining an era and a people, as Jack Kerouac said, "[Frank] sucked a sad poem right out of America."  It is truly a masterwork.  And this is further evidenced by the inclusion, in this exhibit, of Robert Frank's photographs of Paris taken between 1949-52, which, aside from a few standouts, seem to lack the hunger, the immediacy and the absolute genius that you find in the Americans. The Paris photographs seem far more removed, inasmuch as the subjects are literally further away.  Frank took a step back, photographing a post-war Paris of people inhabiting public spaces, but hardly an iconically intimate glimpse into a people and their stories. 

While you're at the exhibit, my advice is to arrive as early as possible, and take in the films first thing--the video rooms are exceedingly small, and tend to get crowded quickly.  On view is Robert Frank's film Pull My Daisy (1959), written and narrated with inexplicably comic delivery by Jack Kerouac and starring Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg, a glimpse into the "secret scatological thought" of the beats and accompanied by a great jazz soundtrack; and True Story (2004), Frank's amateurish video offering a touchingly intimate, poetic glimpse into his private life and some of his more recent work which is rarely exhibited.

--Natalie Hegert

(*Images from top to bottom:  Robert Frank, Detroit, 1955, © Robert Frank from the Americans. Robert Frank, Paris, 1949 - 1952, © 2008 Robert Frank.)