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MET BREUER, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
NEW YORK CITY
JULY 12-NOVEMBER 27, 2016
A black-and-white photograph of a woman in a pillbox hat and fur coat reflects an unmistakable era: the raised eyebrow, slightly parted dark-glossed lips-an insouciant look my mother and her childhood friends and we baby boomers practiced in our mirrors, imitating mid-twentieth-century movie stars. Yet this photo, one of more than a hundred in a recent exhibition of Diane Arbus's early work (1956-62) at the Met Breuer, is light-years from the silver screen.
The exhibition, curated by Jeff L. Rosenheim, included stunning, previously unknown photographs depicting anguish and audacity. An old woman with gaping mouth and gnarled fingers is bound under sheets in a hospital bed; harsh light bleaches the scene to a cadaverous white. A "female impersonator" defiantly raises her chin at the camera, smooth chest vulnerable in a silk robe. Adults, fatigue or perhaps terror marking their faces, awkwardly carry sleeping children. Arbus eschewed sentimentality or a facile aesthetic: marginalized and ordinary people are rendered extraordinary by complex revealed emotion.
I grew up with the iconic photographs reproduced in Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972), from the first large exhibit of her work at the Venice Biennale in 1972. Some of those photographs, part of a rare folio collection (A Box of Ten Photographs, 1970), were mounted in an adjacent gallery at the Met Breuer's exhibition, as were works by Carry Winogrand, Helen Levitt, and others who influenced or were contemporary with Arbus. As a child, I was mesmerized by the heavy-faced, towering man (A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970) and the twin girls in dark dresses (Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967). I also felt guilty...