Diane Arbus at the National Museum Cardiff
A handful of magnificent portraits of women made within a few months of each other dominate an exhibition in Cardiff. Two of them – “Puerto Rican Woman with a Beauty Mark” (1965) and “Woman in a Rose Hat” (1966) – are seen only as faces. Another – “Woman with a Locket in Washington Square Park” (1965) – is seated in a landscape, with enough background visible to articulate at least a little of her world. A third, the strikingly beautiful “Girl in Watch Cap” (1965), shares her space with a blurred grinning boy.
The American photographer Diane Arbus did lots of things well, but perhaps above all she made portraits of people who might otherwise never have been portrayed. Under her rose hat, the woman has wrinkles on her mouth which bring to mind that wonderfully rude Scottish expression “weaned on a pickle’’. This is a face unused to smiling. Yet she has her fancy hat, and glasses à la Edna Everage, and we can see that her shoulders are wrapped in fur. She’s making the best of things. Her hair is grey and a bit straggly. We can take no clues from the plain background that surrounds her. Only late do we notice that her eyes do not quite run straight. The one on our right is straying, leaning out of the picture, as the other engages the camera. The minute we notice, we blink, and look away. It’s then an effort to look back. This is great portraiture by any standards. It defies us to imagine the life of the woman in question.
Arbus worked in a curious no-man’s-land between studio and street. She found her sitters out in the world but she always introduced herself and worked face-to-face. Her sitters can be as anonymous as Weegee’s, or fully known and identified, but they always knew she was there with her camera. Either way, it’s wrong to think of them as freakish. By working so frankly in front of them Arbus gave her people the chance to act out their own identity. She wasn’t one of those photographers who sneak around and steal pictures behind people’s backs. I think of her as a very literary photographer, building character through the accumulation of little details. The writer who comes to mind is James M Cain, the chosen heir of HL Mencken at the Baltimore Sun, who went on to write so many of the great Hollywood films noirs. It is easy to think of Mildred Pierce, for example, as a character from Arbus.
In “A Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing” (1966), the picture is anchored in its left lower corner by a white picket fence. Long before Wisteria Lane, the picket fence was a symbol of all that was most wholesome about the American suburb. Paul Strand made a study of one in 1916 precisely to enjoy its very ordinary beauty. Arbus’s fence is a little tatty, no longer very white.
Because she so rarely photographed from distance, Arbus doesn’t show us the collective. It is hard to remember that she worked in the one short period (between the end of the second world war and the end of the 1960s) when the US actually seemed as successful and as prosperous as its mythology has always claimed it to be. Arbus herself was from a prosperous background, yet she sought strugglers not merely as a trite reaction to family privilege but also in some way because she found their carnival more enlivening. When she does show us real prosperity, as in the famous couple on the lawn at Westchester, or the repeated views of the socialite Mrs T Charlton Henry, or even in her portraits of the likes of Norman Mailer, it is often a little stilted, as though something had to wither in the pursuit of wealth.
The Cardiff exhibition is one of the early results of the donation to the nation of the collection of Anthony d’Offay, the gallerist of contemporary art. His idea has been to circulate (often to provincial museums) individual sections devoted to particular artists under the title of Artist Rooms. This is likely to save the so-far predictably limited policy decision, made by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council some years ago, to favour those museums under an umbrella called Renaissance. If Stromness in the Orkneys can now have a major showing of Bill Viola and Cardiff a shining exhibition of Arbus, then there really will be hugely increased footfall in regional museums.
The Cardiff show coincides and to some extent overlaps with an excellent Arbus show at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London. Both have a large majority of prints made after her death in 1971 by Arbus’s printer Neil Selkirk and a small group made by the photographer herself. The idea that wholly proper Arbus originals (plus the perfectly legitimate editions made under the control of the estate) remain available and affordable remains unfamiliar to many Londoners (prices at Timothy Taylor start at $7,500). There is a lovely image, “Two Female Impersonators Backstage” (1962), which figures both in Cardiff and London. Done before Arbus switched to her signature square-format negatives, it prefigures much of the autobiographical photography that followed. It looks, in particular, like a black-and-white sketch of a Nan Goldin. The two subjects are in contact, but separated by a thick black void. They smile, but their thick make-up makes them seem masked. (Arbus was often attracted to masks.) They are in no particular space, just people. The light areas of body and the dark areas of place are sinuously wrapped around each other. At the time when d’Offay was buying, it was still rare to equate photography so completely with any other art. That is no longer true – but, amazingly, because photography works in multiples, it’s still possible to own it.
The American photographer Diane Arbus did lots of things well, but perhaps above all she made portraits of people who might otherwise never have been portrayed. Under her rose hat, the woman has wrinkles on her mouth which bring to mind that wonderfully rude Scottish expression “weaned on a pickle’’. This is a face unused to smiling. Yet she has her fancy hat, and glasses à la Edna Everage, and we can see that her shoulders are wrapped in fur. She’s making the best of things. Her hair is grey and a bit straggly. We can take no clues from the plain background that surrounds her. Only late do we notice that her eyes do not quite run straight. The one on our right is straying, leaning out of the picture, as the other engages the camera. The minute we notice, we blink, and look away. It’s then an effort to look back. This is great portraiture by any standards. It defies us to imagine the life of the woman in question.
Arbus worked in a curious no-man’s-land between studio and street. She found her sitters out in the world but she always introduced herself and worked face-to-face. Her sitters can be as anonymous as Weegee’s, or fully known and identified, but they always knew she was there with her camera. Either way, it’s wrong to think of them as freakish. By working so frankly in front of them Arbus gave her people the chance to act out their own identity. She wasn’t one of those photographers who sneak around and steal pictures behind people’s backs. I think of her as a very literary photographer, building character through the accumulation of little details. The writer who comes to mind is James M Cain, the chosen heir of HL Mencken at the Baltimore Sun, who went on to write so many of the great Hollywood films noirs. It is easy to think of Mildred Pierce, for example, as a character from Arbus.
In “A Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing” (1966), the picture is anchored in its left lower corner by a white picket fence. Long before Wisteria Lane, the picket fence was a symbol of all that was most wholesome about the American suburb. Paul Strand made a study of one in 1916 precisely to enjoy its very ordinary beauty. Arbus’s fence is a little tatty, no longer very white.
Because she so rarely photographed from distance, Arbus doesn’t show us the collective. It is hard to remember that she worked in the one short period (between the end of the second world war and the end of the 1960s) when the US actually seemed as successful and as prosperous as its mythology has always claimed it to be. Arbus herself was from a prosperous background, yet she sought strugglers not merely as a trite reaction to family privilege but also in some way because she found their carnival more enlivening. When she does show us real prosperity, as in the famous couple on the lawn at Westchester, or the repeated views of the socialite Mrs T Charlton Henry, or even in her portraits of the likes of Norman Mailer, it is often a little stilted, as though something had to wither in the pursuit of wealth.
The Cardiff exhibition is one of the early results of the donation to the nation of the collection of Anthony d’Offay, the gallerist of contemporary art. His idea has been to circulate (often to provincial museums) individual sections devoted to particular artists under the title of Artist Rooms. This is likely to save the so-far predictably limited policy decision, made by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council some years ago, to favour those museums under an umbrella called Renaissance. If Stromness in the Orkneys can now have a major showing of Bill Viola and Cardiff a shining exhibition of Arbus, then there really will be hugely increased footfall in regional museums.
The Cardiff show coincides and to some extent overlaps with an excellent Arbus show at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London. Both have a large majority of prints made after her death in 1971 by Arbus’s printer Neil Selkirk and a small group made by the photographer herself. The idea that wholly proper Arbus originals (plus the perfectly legitimate editions made under the control of the estate) remain available and affordable remains unfamiliar to many Londoners (prices at Timothy Taylor start at $7,500). There is a lovely image, “Two Female Impersonators Backstage” (1962), which figures both in Cardiff and London. Done before Arbus switched to her signature square-format negatives, it prefigures much of the autobiographical photography that followed. It looks, in particular, like a black-and-white sketch of a Nan Goldin. The two subjects are in contact, but separated by a thick black void. They smile, but their thick make-up makes them seem masked. (Arbus was often attracted to masks.) They are in no particular space, just people. The light areas of body and the dark areas of place are sinuously wrapped around each other. At the time when d’Offay was buying, it was still rare to equate photography so completely with any other art. That is no longer true – but, amazingly, because photography works in multiples, it’s still possible to own it.
