"Cocteau in Bed with Mask."
Art review
Subversive and stunning
Abbott’s portraits communicate energy, excitement of 1920s Paris
"Cocteau in Bed with Mask."
CAMBRIDGE — Born in 1898, you’re from Ohio. This being an era when travel is so much rarer than today, it could be safely assumed that you’d have stayed there. More than that, you’re a woman. So even if you did manage to move, you’d still be expected to be demure and domestic, eschewing darkrooms (just as an example) for drawing rooms. Yet in one of those minor miracles so often necessary to the major miracle that is the emergence of an enduring artist, you’ve not only moved, you’ve moved to Paris (via Greenwich Village). It being the 1920s, this means you’re situated in the cultural capital of the world. You’ve also been frequently situated in a darkroom, since you’ve spent the last few years as the photographer Man Ray’s assistant.
You are, of course, Berenice Abbott, a woman not much given to assumptions, safe or otherwise.
Presented with so hard won an opportunity, you’re not going to waste it. The Midwest may have been left far behind, but not Midwestern practicality. Although all but one of the photographs in “Berenice Abbott: Portraits’’ is from 1926 or ‘27, there are just 16 images. Even so small a number — surely, no show this year will have a higher percentage of great pictures — communicates a potent sense of the excitement and energy that must have filled Abbott’s studio on the rue de Bac. As she photographed royalty and writers and heiresses and several people already on their way to becoming legends (Jean Cocteau, Sylvia Beach, Leadbelly), Springfield, Ohio, must have seemed very far away.
As if to underscore that distance, there’s a marked subversiveness on display here. Three of the sitters are African-American. Two women wear men’s neckties, another (The New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner) wears trousers. There are three photographs of Cocteau, who was subversiveness made flesh.
The most moving photograph shows an old, shabby-looking man. Appearing slightly sheepish, he sits in profile. This gives the impression he’s staring at Beach, whose portrait is next to his. (The show has been shrewdly hung, so that many of the pictures seem to be interacting with each other, as those two do.) The old man is Eugene Atget, the photographer who had unassumingly come to possess Paris as perhaps no artist has ever possessed a city — not even James Joyce and Dublin. Abbott shot him, too, in 1928, though the portrait isn’t in the show. The woman really did get around.
The photograph is triply moving. Atget would die within a few months. Abbott, spunky gal that she was, would buy up and preserve much of his archive. Finally, Abbott’s most lasting achievement, the photographs that make up her “Changing New York,’’ from the 1930s, honor Atget’s legacy and extend it to what would soon become the next cultural capital of the world.
Several of the “Changing New York’’ pictures are among the 20 Abbotts to be found on the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth floors of the new Sloan School building. There are also photos from her Route 1 and illustrating-science projects (the latter of which was associated with MIT). The pictures aren’t on public display, per se. But the Dean’s Gallery wall text does call visitors’ attention to them — and various school employees didn’t seem to mind when they encountered an Atget-shabby man (the resemblance, alas, ends there) wandering in search of them. As scavenger hunts go, this is a real good one.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com. 
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