Newsletter - Spring 2003
Future Exhibitions

Diane Arbus: Family Albums
2 September - 7 December 2003

Diane Arbus (1923-1971) Untitled (Marcella Matthaei, eleven)

This exhibition promises to change the received view of the remarkable American portrait photographer Diane Arbus. Previously, our understanding of Arbus and her work has been based on the limited number of photographs available for public and scholarly scrutiny. This project brings to light new pictures, more than doubling the body of work that is generally known, and promises innovative ways of seeing Arbus's photography anew.

The impetus for this project came with the discovery of a previously unknown group of prints. A Mount Holyoke College alumna, Gay Humphrey Matthaei '52, brought to the museum a collection of approximately 45 portrait photographs of her family, all produced by Arbus during a two-day shoot in their lavish New York townhouse in 1969, not long before the photographer committed suicide. These photographs immediately generated excitement among the staff, which only heightened when we learned that the family also had a complete set of contact prints -- 28 sheets evidencing hundreds of images Arbus decided not to print. The Matthaei Family Collection is a treasure trove -- the largest complete single sitting available for study. This cache of pictures significantly revises our view of Arbus's oveure.

The process of developing a substantive exhibition around this unknown body 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 consist primarily of photographs Arbus took for Esquire, which came to the University of Kansas with that magazine's archives. These prints, many of which are accompanied by related proof sheets, show the broad range of Arbus's work 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 family, and various people from whom Arbus fashioned her own surrogate family.

The overall theme, to which the exhibition's title refers, is related directly to the artist's own frequently repeated wish to produce a family album for publication. Drawing on the holdings of the Spencer Museum of Art and the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, in addition to the portraits in the Matthaei Family Collection, the exhibition culls from Arbus's work, as she herself never did, a collective image of the American family of the turbulent years in the late 1960s. It presents traditional family groupings as well as alternative families/communities or "implied" families. The photographs will be augmented with printed materials such as copies of Esquire, which reproduced Arbus's family portraits, and issues of the New York Times Magazine, which published a series of her photographs of "Children in Fashion" in the late 1960s.

Diane Arbus (1923-1971) Untitled (Konrad Henry Matthaei and his son Konrad Robert, two)

Co-curators of the exhibition, Anthony W. Lee, associate professor of art history at Mount Holyoke College, and John Pultz, associate professor of art history at the University of Kansas and curator of photography at the Spencer Museum of Art, have each written an interpretive essay for a companion book, to be published by Yale University Press. From South Hadley, the exhibition will travel to other venues, including the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, and the Spencer Museum of Art.