William Eggleston's Big Wheels

This enigmatic 1970 portrait of a tricycle took photography down a whole new road

  • By Mark Feeney
  • Smithsonian magazine, July-August 2011, Subscribe
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Tricycle
"The most hated show of the year" is how a critic described Eggleston's landmark 1976 exhibition. (Eggleston Artistic Trust Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York)

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How to account for such a miracle of seeing and recording? Eggleston, now 72, has long declined to discuss the whys and wherefores of specific photographs. Reiner Holzemer’s 2008 documentary film, William Eggleston: Photographer, includes a black-and-white family snapshot. It shows a very young Eggleston in the foreground, looking natty in cap and sailor suit, a tricycle behind him. Might it be a sidewalk-worthy equivalent of Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud? Surely, not even Eggleston can say. In such indeterminacy begins the mystery and wonder of art, three-wheeled and otherwise.

Mark Feeney, a Boston Globe writer, won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2008.


Although a photograph always shows the same things, that doesn’t mean those things are always seen the same. This William Eggleston picture is variously known as Untitled, Tricycle and Memphis, 1970. It has been variously seen, too. Now considered a classic, it was initially greeted in many quarters with incomprehension, even as an outright affront.

Eggleston’s tricycle first attracted attention as part of a 1976 exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It appeared, in fact, on the cover of the exhibition catalog, William Eggleston’s Guide. “The most hated show of the year,” one critic wrote. “Guide to what?” detractors sniffed about a show whose photographic subjects also included a tiled bathroom wall, the interior of a kitchen stove and the contents of a freezer. Hilton Kramer called Eggleston’s images “perfectly banal” and “perfectly boring.” Kramer, the New York Times’ chief art critic, was playing off of John Szarkowski, MoMA’s director of photography, who had described Eggleston’s photographs as “perfect.” Instead of perfection, Kramer saw “dismal figures inhabiting a commonplace world of little visual interest.”

How well do those words apply to Eggleston’s tricycle? “Dismal” is a subjective judgment. “Commonplace?” Yes, and proudly so. “Of little visual interest”? Well, that’s another story. For starters, Eggleston’s photograph represents a tectonic shift in the medium’s history: the growing acceptance of color in art photography. Tellingly, the MoMA show was the first major solo all-color photography exhibition in the museum’s history. Eggleston was the most prominent member of a cadre of young, talented photographers working in color: Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Sternfeld and Eggleston’s fellow Southerner William Christenberry. It was one thing to use color on a fashion model or a sunset. But a tricycle?

Eggleston’s photograph also can be seen in larger cultural terms. In its small way, it’s an example of the growing prominence of white Southern culture in the ’70s—from Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy to the popularity of rock bands like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd to the election of Jimmy Carter in the same year as the MoMA show. Then there’s a further, literary dimension. As the curator Walter Hopps wrote in an essay for a book following Eggleston’s 1998 Hasselblad Award, his “photographs carry the enriched reverberations of fiction.” This rather forlorn-looking child’s toy (notice the rusted handlebars) is a visual correlative for the ways banality was being used in the short stories of such contemporary writers as Ann Beattie and, especially, Raymond Carver.

Yet the best argument for the tricycle’s visual interest isn’t its place in photographic history or its Southern prov­­­-enance or its affinity with literary “dirty realism.” It’s the photograph itself.

Homely objects had a long tradition of being photographed—but they were finely wrought homely objects, as in the portfolio of hand tools Walker Evans made for Fortune magazine in 1955. Eggleston’s tricycle is different. It’s at once beneath homeliness yet oddly exalted. One way Eggleston achieves this effect is obvious: he shoots the tricycle from a low angle. It looms large in the imagination because it looms large, period. Looking heavenward, Eggleston’s camera bestows on that tricycle the majesty—and ineffability—of an archangel’s throne.

The tricycle does not stand alone. You also find two ranch houses and a car in a carport. You have a patch of dead grass, some asphalt, the sweep of gray sky. The scene is all very, well, negligible. Or is it? The grass and asphalt almost eerily mirror the sky as neutral space. The trike is shot in such a way as to dominate the foreground, like a chariot of very youthful gods. Archangels, deities: for Eggleston, the profane is what’s sacred. Has anyone ever evoked the enchantment of the banal quite so well? “I am at war with the obvious,” he has said.

The tricycle’s many curves mock the angularity of the roofs to the rear. Then there’s the chromatic play of red handle grips with bluish-green seat and frame, not forgetting the several bits of white on seat, frame, stem and wheel rims—the whiteness playing off the roofs and trim of the houses. Color is absolutely not an afterthought. Eggleston started out as a black-and-white photographer—a good one, too, inspired in part by Henri Cartier-Bresson. The point is, Eggleston embraced color photography consciously, aware of how much a richer palette would bring to his art. Remove color, and you severely diminish the effect. The whole thing is a model of unobtrusive artistry amid the everyday nondescript. It seems so simple and artless. Looked at closely, though, it’s as cunning as a seduction, as ordered as a sonnet.

How to account for such a miracle of seeing and recording? Eggleston, now 72, has long declined to discuss the whys and wherefores of specific photographs. Reiner Holzemer’s 2008 documentary film, William Eggleston: Photographer, includes a black-and-white family snapshot. It shows a very young Eggleston in the foreground, looking natty in cap and sailor suit, a tricycle behind him. Might it be a sidewalk-worthy equivalent of Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud? Surely, not even Eggleston can say. In such indeterminacy begins the mystery and wonder of art, three-wheeled and otherwise.

Mark Feeney, a Boston Globe writer, won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2008.


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Comments (6)

Was there any sense that the tryke is screaming of escape? I will not fall victim to this suburbia. I still have a chance to get out of here. And I will!

Posted by anne kristoff on August 3,2011 | 03:32 PM

By 1970 modernistic art movements with their DEPENDENCE ON THE WORD GAME OF CURATORIAL JUSTIFICATION completely dominated the more highly esteemed institutions of the art world. It was with the 1976 Eggleston exhibition at MOMA that figurative subjects too succumbed to curatorial sophistry, (some would say "were hijacked". Fresh or rehashed, the sophistry still dominates: "...it is an example of white Southern culture...enriched reverberations of fiction...beneath homeliness yet oddly exalted...It looms large in the imagination because it looms large, period...bestows on that tricycle the majesty - the ineffability - of an archangel's throne...the profane is what's sacred...the enchantment of the banal...the tricycle's many curves mock the angularity of the roofs...as cunning as a seduction...a miracle of seeing and recording...a sidewalk worthy equivalent." Clearly these verbal manifestations may well be seen as a mockery of current art criticism. Can you see them exactly as they are as a part of one of Garrison Keillor's skits. Art critcs in general are would be novelists. They write well enough, but they lack the talent and the experience to make valid judgements regarding art.
Any serious discussion of art has to begin with the question of quality. Eggleston's 1976 exhibition was at times condemned for including such subjects as a tiled bathroom wall, the interior of a kitchen stove, and the contents of a freezer. The only legitimate grounds for condemning these subjets can be the absence of quality. Ironically two recent exhibitions, surely familiar to Mr. Feeny, featured those same three subjects in truly great works of art. The stove interior in a drawing by Catherine Murphy at Knoedler and both the freezer and the tiled bathroom by Antonio Lopez Garcia at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

Posted by Peter Daumants on July 30,2011 | 07:23 PM

This article with comments reminds me of the genius, Viktor Schreckengost, from Sebring, Ohio. (1906-2008) He had his hand in fabulous "art" items from relief zoo murals, art vases, ceramic dishes and even an aeroplane pedal car. He did it all and very well. One cannot dispute his role in art as well as design and teaching. All to say, photography IS a profoundly beautiful part of art, isn't it?

Posted by Liz Stewart on July 15,2011 | 02:48 PM

Love the article... And as a Memphian I have been looking for this spot for some time .. no luck!!

Posted by Devin Greaney on July 6,2011 | 03:37 PM

One perspective that was not included in Mr. Feeney’s article is that the blue tricycle – "a chariot of a very youthful god" – frames the blue automobile, giving rise to the thought that the “little tike” will someday be a man driving a powerful shiny blue chariot … ugh … car.

Posted by Ellen on June 28,2011 | 09:28 PM

When my July/August issue of the Smithsonian arrived I saw the cover banner “A Tricycle for the Ages” so I immediately flipped to page 10. There was the photo of a familiar symbol of my childhood. When I was about to read the article titled “Big Wheels” I assumed I was going read about something I knew all about. I had flashbacks to the early 1950s. At that time I had a trike similar to the one pictured, However mine was larger with the front wheel being perhaps 24 to 26 inches in diameter. It was the classic tricycle of the era. However, my oldest brother, Chuck, an inveterate thinker, could never “leave well enough alone”. He took the tricycle and removed the front wheel and seat. Then he flipped the chassis upside down and reinstalled the front wheel on the inverted frame. He bolted a piece of plywood between the back wheels to create a place to sit and pedal. Bingo! He had a low slung serviceable tricycle that was much more stable than the original design with its high center gravity. He called it a “Rasputin” (Not that it had anything to do with the Russian Mystic. He just liked the word but found few opportunities to work it into a conversation.)

Our ‘Rasputin’ was the envy of the neighborhood and without doubt my brother’s greatest missed opportunity. It wasn’t until about 20 years later the same design was released as the now legendary “Big Wheel.” Of course my brother was only about 12 years old when he flipped that frame so we don’t lament not commercializing the contraption. Somewhere in the family album we have a historic photo of one us on our prototype Big Wheel with the 1946 family Ford in the background to establish the timeline.
Jim Gustafson

Posted by Jim Gustafson on June 28,2011 | 02:51 PM



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