| Diane Arbus Revelations | |
| A Special Exhibition Review by Stan Parchin |
About
the show:
The sharp eye of Diane Arbus (1923-1971) is the focus of a major retrospective
of her photographic works at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. One can only imagine what her mind's eye would have
seen had it encountered Christo's orange Gates that recently surrounded this long overdue show of her black and white prints at The Met in
Central Park. After all, New York was the primary source of her artistic
inspiration. This spectacular panoply of her ocular achievements runs through May 30, 2005. Long lines waited to see her
works
in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Houston. After its showing in Manhattan, Diane Arbus Revelations will travel to
Essen, London, Barcelona and Minneapolis through October 2006.
This is the first comprehensive show of more than 180 of Arbus's photographs in over 30 years. The Met's presentation, in
spacious, airy second-floor galleries to the left of the Grand Staircase, dignifies her as one of
twentieth-century America's most influential photographers. It displays her writings as well as unpublished experimental
photographs from 1940 through the works of her mature style in the 1960s.
Signature images such as A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y. 1968 and A Jewish giant at home with his
parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970 have been drawn from Arbus's vast archive as well as major public and private collections.
Together all of the pictures illustrate her ability to use the camera to paint an
unbiased tableau of largely New York life.
Arbus's (née Nemerov) fashion photography background in the early 1940s served her well when she studied under three
successive photographers through the late 1950s. Having honed her skills, more than 100 of her photographs were subsequently
published in Esquire, Harper's Bazaar and other publications in the 1960s. Some were in the form of
photographic essays while
others occasionally included her own written observations.
Many of Arbus's subjects who comprised her inspired "contemporary anthropology" came from her native New York. As exhibited in the
show, they included middle-class families, carnival performers, transvestites, eccentrics and notable personalities in a variety
of post-World War II settings. She managed to engage many of them consciously in the photographic dialogue between artist
and subject, thus heightening the sense of drama in her compositions.
Among the seminal works in the show are five prints from a rare set of thirteen promised as a gift to The Met. They include: Lady
on a bus, N.Y.C. 1956; Masked man at a ball, N.Y.C. 1967; and Seated man in bra and stockings, N.Y.C. 1967.
Arbus achieved clearer photographic results starting in 1962 when she began to use a square format (2-1/4-inch twin lens reflex)
camera instead of a 35 mm one in vogue at the time. Up until her unfortunate suicide in 1971 (by means of a barbiturate overdose and
slit wrists), her images produced during this period are characterized by a greater clarity and formal style. Child with a toy hand grenade
in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962, Two ladies at the automat, N.Y.C. 1966, Boy in the straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade,
N.Y.C. 1967 and Woman in the veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C. 1968 are four
examples of this more immediate photographic technique. In Two ladies at the automat, one of Arbus's most famous iconic artworks,
the pair, dressed in their furry fashionable finery with oversized hats, are poignantly captured at a table in mid-conversation with cigarettes
burning, enjoying each other's company. Arbus leaves one wondering what they were talking about.
A celebrated Guggenheim Fellow in 1963 and 1966, Arbus later expanded her locales from New York and New Jersey to include
Pennsylvania, Florida and California, where she searched for both images of everyday life as well as the unusual. Arbus's
exploration of reality and illusion through her camera served artistically at times to blur the distinction between the two.
This provides the viewer with a revealing, photographic cultural cross-section of the sometimes rough underbelly of postwar
America.
The Met's version of this show includes three rooms or "libraries" at significant points in the exhibition. They present ephemera
like Arbus's technical notebooks, three of her cameras, personal writings and contact sheets.
About
the catalogue:
Arbus, Doon, et al. Diane Arbus Revelations (exh. cat).
New York: Random House, Inc., 2003.
The show's 352-page oversized catalogue includes more than 200 duotone
reproductions of Arbus's works, accompanied by scholarly essays that explore the
candid nature and innovative techniques of her photography.
For further reading:
Arbus, Doon and Marvin Israel (eds.). Diane Arbus: An Aperture
Monograph (25th Anniversary Edition). New York: Aperture Foundation, 1997.
"Diane Arbus Revelations" is on view through May 30, 2005 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82
Street, New York, NY 10028 (Telephone: 212-535-7710; Website: www.metmuseum.org
).
The museum is open Tuesday through Thursday from 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM and Friday and
Saturday from 9:30 AM to 9:00 PM. SUGGESTED
admission
is $15.00 for adults. A recorded tour is available for this show. Paid parking is available in The Museum Garage.
*Images to accompany this review were not available at press time. The reader can, however, see five of them on the Internet.
The special exhibitions section for this show of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's website (listed above) has four of them. And the
same section in the Victoria and Albert Museum's website (www.vam.ac.uk) has one photograph.
There are also links to images on the web at this profile
of Diane Arbus.
**************************
From
your Guide: Stan Parchin, Senior Correspondent for Museum/Special Exhibitions,
is a specialist in ancient, late-medieval and Renaissance art and history. His interests include: the art and
culture of Old and New Kingdom Egypt; the Italian and Northern Renaissances;
Church history; and witchcraft, heresy and social dissent in late-medieval and early Modern Europe.
