September
12 , 2003 A
Family Affair: Arbus Photos Come to Art Museum
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Diane
Arbus, Untitled
(Marcella Matthaei), 1969. Matthaei Collection of Commissioned
Family Photographs by Diane Arbus ©Marcella Hague Matthaei
Ziesman |
New
York photographer Diane Arbus is perhaps best known for her photographs
from the 1960s and 1970s of people who were viewed as outside
the mainstream—dwarves, couples at a nudist colony, the
mentally ill. For many of her magazine assignments and private
commissions, Arbus also photographed “ordinary” people
and celebrities, but in her hands even the most benign subject
could strike an unsettling note. It is almost impossible to respond
to an Arbus photograph with indifference.
Diane Arbus: Family Albums, a major traveling exhibition
developed by the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in collaboration
with the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, offers
an excellent introduction to Arbus’s work. Cocurated by
Mount Holyoke associate professor of art history Anthony Lee and
John Pultz, associate professor of art history at the University
of Kansas and curator of photography at the Spencer Museum, the
exhibition presents dozens of prints as well as more than 50 contact
sheets. A book authored by Lee and Pultz, which was published
by Yale University Press, accompanies it.
Late in her life Arbus, who was twice a Guggenheim fellow and
the first American photographer to be included in the Venice Biennale,
had begun creating a kind of family album. But it was left unfinished
when she committed suicide in 1971. “It was not an album
in the commonplace sense of that word, in that it was not meant
to contain pictures of her immediate family,” Lee explained
in a recent conversation with museum director Marianne Doezema.
He and Pultz intended Diane Arbus: Family Albums “as a glimpse
of what such an album might have looked like had she brought it
to fruition.”
The project began in 1999, when Mount Holyoke alumna Gay Humphrey
Matthaei ’52 contacted the museum about photographs Arbus
had taken of her family. Seeing them, museum staff and Lee were
instantly excited. Said Lee, “I had never seen so many photographs
of a single shoot by Arbus and was immediately struck by their
huge importance.” Mount Holyoke then approached the Spencer
Museum, which has a strong Arbus collection, and eventually the
two institutions agreed to collaborate.
“All families are creepy in a way,” Arbus wrote to
a friend in 1968. Lee said that as he and Pultz studied Arbus’s
work, they were amazed to find how many photographs “were
devoted to families and family members: fathers, mothers, children,
partners, in all kinds of arrangements.” The exhibition
includes the 1971 portraits she made for Esquire of the “perfect”
television family the Nelsons, a fascinating 1965 series of teenagers
and their parents, and contact sheets and two gelatin silver prints
of her 1964 session photographing Marguerite Oswald, mother of
alleged John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. It also includes
prints and contact sheets from two days in 1969 when she photographed
a Matthaei family reunion.
Some of the Matthaei photographs are of a daughter, Marcella Matthaei,
a girl on the cusp of adolescence. Although many shots in the
contact sheets show Marcella interacting with her parents and
siblings, Arbus also repeatedly photographed her alone, isolated
against a curtained window or a paneled wall. In Untitled (Marcella
Matthaei), we see her in a lacy sleeveless dress, standing stiffly
with her arms at her sides, her face expressionless, her eyes
and their large dark pupils nearly hidden beneath thick bangs.
The more we look at the photo, the less we learn about Marcella,
who reveals little of her inner life to the camera. The Matthaei
series contains many intriguing photographs, but those of Marcella,
in their sense of isolation and unknowability, are by far the
most riveting.
Lectures and gallery talks about the exhibition are scheduled
throughout September and October. The first, by John Szarkowski,
a photographer and director emeritus of the Museum of Modern Art’s
photography department, takes place Thursday, September 18, at
7 pm in the Art Building’s Gamble Auditorium. Szarkowski,
who organized the first major retrospective of Arbus’s work
at MoMA in 1972, will speak on the topic “Diane Arbus as
a Photographer.” A reception will follow.
Other talks include “Diane Arbus at the Five Colleges, 1971,”
by photographer Jerome Liebling, Thursday, September 25, 4 pm,
Weissman Gallery; “Searching for Diane Arbus’s ‘Family
Album,’” by John Pultz, Thursday, October 2, 4 pm,
Weissman Gallery; “Family Portraits and Fascination,”
by Sandra Matthews, associate professor, film and photography,
Hampshire College, Thursday, October 16, 4 pm, Weissman Gallery;
and “Making Arbus Strange: History, Time, and Memory in
the Arbus Archive,” by Laura Wexler, professor, American
studies, and chair, women’s and gender studies, Yale University,
Thursday, October 23, 7 pm, Gamble Auditorium.
Now through October
30, members of the Mount Holyoke community may submit their own
family photos for posting in the Mount Holyoke Family Photos
exhibition in the museum lobby. This exhibition will be on view
from September 16 through November 2. And a poetry reading on
Thursday, November 13, at 7 pm in the Warbeke Gallery, will feature
published poets as well as winners of a student poetry contest
on the theme of family. For information about the contest, which
will be juried by Robert Shaw, professor of English, and Leah
Glasser, dean of first-year studies and lecturer in English, call
x2245.
Diane Arbus: Family Albums continues through December 7.
For more information, visit the art museum’s Web
site.
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