2
September–7 December 2003
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Diane
Arbus (1923-1971)
Untitled (Marcella Matthaei)
Gelatin silver print photograph, 1969. Matthaei Collection
of Commissioned Family Photographs by Diane Arbus
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Diane Arbus, a
pivotal and controversial figure in American photography
in the 1960s, is well known for her direct photographs of
people on the edge of societal acceptance. She was twice
a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 1967 she exhibited her photographs
at the controversial and influential "New Documents"
show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. With her suicide
in 1971, rather than falling into obscurity, the photographer
continued to grow in fame and her photographs obtained international
recognition. In 1972 she was the first American photographer
to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and the Museum of
Modern Art, New York mounted a major retrospective of her
work–easily the most popular photography exhibition
since Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man. Now
the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, in collaboration with
the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, has
developed a major exhibition, Diane Arbus: Family Albums.
It brings to the fore an enormous body of work never before
seen publicly and promises to change the received view of
this remarkable photographer.
The
overall theme, to which the exhibition’s title refers,
is related directly to the photographer’s own frequently
repeated wish to produce a family album. Arbus was interested
in compiling expansive and metaphorical images of the 1960s
family. Gathering pictures for it, she acknowledged, was like
herding and counting animals for Noah’s ark, preserving
a mixture of modern American lifestyles before an impending
catastrophe. Sometimes this gathering was deliberate, sometimes
propitious as she roamed the streets of New York. For example,
in 1968 she wrote, "I stopped two elderly sisters the
other day and three generations of Jewish women from Brooklyn
whom I am to visit soon…the youngest is pregnant. And
especially there is a woman I stopped in a Bookstore who lives
in Westchester which is Upper Suburbia. She is about 35 with
terribly blonde hair and enormously eyelashed and booted and
probably married to a dress manufacturer or restaurateur and
I said I wanted to photograph her with her husband and children
so she suggested I wait til warm weather so I can do it around
the pool!…They are a fascinating family. I think all
families are creepy in a way."
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Diane
Arbus (1923-1971)
Untitled (Konrad Henry Matthaei and his son Konrad
Robert)
Gelatin silver print photograph, December 1969. Matthaei
Collection of Commissioned Family Photographs by Diane
Arbus |
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Imagine the excitement,
then, when in September 1999 Mount Holyoke alumna Gay Humphrey
Matthaei (class of 1952) brought to the Art Museum a collection
of family portraits taken by Arbus in 1969. The excitement
only heightened when Matthaei disclosed that this cache
was only a portion of a much larger body of work. Indeed,
the family has a complete set of contact prints packed with
more than three hundred pictures that Arbus took of them.
Products of the largest complete single sitting available
for scholarly scrutiny, these photographs provide an opportunity
to explore Arbus’s working methods in ways not previously
possible.
Developing
a substantive exhibition around this unknown group of photographs
led to a collaboration between the Mount Holyoke College Art
Museum and the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of
Kansas. The Spencer holdings of Arbus’s work consist
primarily of photographs she took for Esquire. These
prints, many of which are accompanied by related proof sheets,
show the photographer’s broad range–and especially
her interest in the family. Depicting children, couples, mothers,
and fathers, they include public figures with their children
(such as television’s Ozzie and Harriet Nelson), and
they also picture various people which Arbus fashioned as
surrogate families.
Drawing
on the holdings of the Spencer Museum of Art and the Mount
Holyoke College Art Museum, in addition to the Matthaei family
portraits, the exhibition culls from Arbus’s work, as
she never had the chance to do, a collective image of the
family in a turbulent decade of American history. It presents
traditional family groupings as well as alternative families/communities
and "implied" families and is augmented with printed
materials published at the time and a major companion book
published by Yale University Press, co-authored by Mount Holyoke
professor of art history Anthony Lee. As Lee writes, "The
dialectic between form and content in pictures and the tension
between public and private identities for families…were
the two great, completely interwoven subjects of [Arbus’s]
work. They were…what became the nugget of her never-finished
project: to turn the prosaic aspects of conventional portrait
photography…into a more coherent, self-conscious, and
meaning-producing form about human belonging." From South
Hadley, the exhibition will travel to the Grey Art Gallery
at New York University and the Portland Museum of Art before
its final installation at the Spencer Museum of Art.
Diane
Arbus: Family Albums Exhibition Schedule
Grey Art Gallery
and Study Center
New York, New York
13 January–27 March 2004
Portland Museum of
Art
Portland, Maine
5 June–1 August 2004
Spencer Museum of
Art
Lawrence, Kansas
16 October 2004–16 January 2005
Portland Art Museum
Portland, Oregon
19 February–24 April 2005
Georgia Museum of
Art
Athens, Georgia
18 June–14 August 2005
Reynolda House
Museum of American Art
Winston-Salem, NC
15 September–4 December 2005
Naples Museum of
Art
Naples, FL
January–April 2006
