Diane Arbus facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Diane Arbus
Photograph by Allan Arbus (a film test), c. 1949
Born	Diane Nemerov (1923-03-14)March 14, 1923 New York City, U.S.
Died	July 26, 1971(1971-07-26) (aged 48) New York City, U.S.
Occupation	Photographer
Spouse(s)	Allan Arbus ​ ​ (m. 1941; div. 1969)​
Partner(s)	Marvin Israel (1959–1971; her death)
Children	Doon Amy
Relatives	Howard Nemerov (brother) Alexander Nemerov (nephew) Frank Russek (grandfather)

Diane Arbus (/diːˈæn ˈɑːrbəs/; née Nemerov; March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971) was an American photographer. She photographed a wide range of subjects including children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. "She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter. Arbus's imagery helped to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people.

In her lifetime she achieved some recognition and renown with the publication, beginning in 1960, of photographs in such magazines as Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, London's Sunday Times Magazine, and Artforum. In 1963 the Guggenheim Foundation awarded Arbus a fellowship for her proposal entitled, "American Rites, Manners and Customs". She was awarded a renewal of her fellowship in 1966. John Szarkowski, the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City from 1962 to 1991, championed her work and included it in his 1967 exhibit New Documents along with the work of Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Her photographs were also included in a number of other major group shows.

In 1972, a year after her death, Arbus became the first photographer to be included in the Venice Biennale where her photographs were "the overwhelming sensation of the American Pavilion" and "extremely powerful and very strange".

The first major retrospective of Arbus' work was held in 1972 at MoMA, organized by Szarkowski. The retrospective garnered the highest attendance of any exhibition in MoMA's history to date. Millions viewed traveling exhibitions of her work from 1972 to 1979. The book accompanying the exhibition, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, edited by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel and first published in 1972 has never been out of print.

Personal life

Arbus was born Diane Nemerov to David Nemerov and Gertrude Russek Nemerov, a Jewish couple – immigrants from Soviet Russia – who lived in New York City and owned Russeks, a Fifth Avenue department store, co-founded by Arbus' grandfather Frank Russek. Because of her family's wealth, Arbus was insulated from the effects of the Great Depression while growing up in the 1930s. Her father became a painter after retiring from Russeks. Her younger sister became a sculptor and designer, and her older brother, the poet Howard Nemerov, taught English at Washington University in St. Louis and was appointed United States Poet Laureate. Howard's son is the Americanist art historian Alexander Nemerov.

Arbus's parents were not deeply involved in raising their children, who were overseen by maids and governesses. Her mother had a busy social life and underwent a period of clinical depression for approximately a year, then recovered, and her father was busy with work. Diane separated herself from her family and her lavish childhood.

Arbus attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a college-preparatory school. In 1941, at the age of 18, she married her childhood sweetheart, Allan Arbus, whom she had dated since age 14. Their daughter Doon, who would become a writer, was born in 1945; their daughter Amy, who would become a photographer, was born in 1954. Arbus and her husband worked together in commercial photography from 1946 to 1956, but Allan remained very supportive of her work even after she left the business and began an independent relationship to photography.

Arbus and her husband separated in 1959, although they maintained a close friendship. The couple also continued to share a darkroom, where Allan's studio assistants processed her negatives, and she printed her work. The couple divorced in 1969 when he moved to California to pursue acting. He was popularly known for his role as Dr. Sidney Freedman on the television show M*A*S*H. Before his move to California, Allan set up her darkroom, and they thereafter maintained a long correspondence.

In late 1959, Arbus began a relationship with the art director and painter Marvin Israel that would last until her death. All the while, he remained married to Margaret Ponce Israel, an accomplished mixed-media artist. Marvin Israel both spurred Arbus creatively and championed her work, encouraging her to create her first portfolio. Among other photographers and artists she befriended, Arbus was close to photographer Richard Avedon; he was approximately the same age, his family had also run a Fifth Avenue department store, and many of his photographs were also characterized by detailed frontal poses.

Photographic career

Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. (1966–1967) at the National Gallery of Art in 2022

Arbus received her first camera, a Graflex, from Allan shortly after they married. Shortly thereafter, she enrolled in classes with photographer Berenice Abbott. The Arbuses' interests in photography led them, in 1941, to visit the gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, and learn about the photographers Mathew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, Paul Strand, Bill Brandt, and Eugène Atget. In the early 1940s, Diane's father employed them to take photographs for the department store's advertisements. Allan was a photographer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War II.

In 1946, after the war, the Arbuses began a commercial photography business called "Diane & Allan Arbus", with Diane as art director and Allan as the photographer. She would come up with the concepts for their shoots and then take care of the models. She grew dissatisfied with this role, a role even her husband thought was "demeaning". They contributed to Glamour, Seventeen, Vogue, and other magazines even though "they both hated the fashion world". Despite over 200 pages of their fashion editorial in Glamour, and over 80 pages in Vogue, the Arbuses' fashion photography has been described as of "middling quality". Edward Steichen's noted 1955 photography exhibition, The Family of Man, did include a photograph by the Arbuses of a father and son reading a newspaper.

She studied briefly with Alexey Brodovich in 1954. However, it was her studies with Lisette Model, which began in 1956, that encouraged Arbus to focus exclusively on her own work. That year Arbus quit the commercial photography business and began numbering her negatives. (Her last known negative was labeled #7459.) Based on Model's advice, Arbus avoided loading film in the camera as an exercise in truly seeing. Arbus also credits Model with making it clear to her that "the more specific you are, the more general it'll be."

By 1956 she worked with a 35mm Nikon, wandering the streets of New York City and meeting her subjects largely, though not always, by chance. The idea of personal identity as socially constructed is one that Arbus came back to, whether it be performers, women and men wearing makeup, or a literal mask obstructing one's face. Critics have speculated that the choices in her subjects reflected her own identity issues, for she said that the only thing she suffered from as a child was never having felt adversity. This evolved into a longing for things that money couldn't buy such as experiences in the underground social world. She is often praised for her sympathy for these subjects, a quality which is not immediately understood through the images themselves, but through her writing and the testimonies of the men and women she portrayed. A few years later, in 1958 she began making lists of who and what she was interested in photographing. She began photographing on assignment for magazines such as Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, and The Sunday Times Magazine in 1959.

Around 1962, Arbus switched from a 35mm Nikon camera which produced the grainy rectangular images characteristic of her post-studio work to a twin-lens reflex Rolleiflex camera which produced more detailed square images. In 1964, Arbus began using a 2-1/4 Mamiyaflex camera with flash in addition to the Rolleiflex.

Arbus's style is said to be "direct and unadorned, a frontal portrait centered in a square format. Her pioneering use of flash in daylight isolated the subjects from the background, which contributed to the photos' surreal quality." Her methods included establishing a strong personal relationship with her subjects and re-photographing some of them over many years.

In spite of being widely published and achieving some artistic recognition, Arbus struggled to support herself through her work. "During her lifetime, there was no market for collecting photographs as works of art, and her prints usually sold for $100 or less." It is evident from her correspondence that lack of money was a persistent concern.

In 1963, Arbus was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a project on "American rites, manners, and customs"; the fellowship was renewed in 1966.

Throughout the 1960s, Arbus supported herself largely by taking magazine assignments and commissions. For example, in 1968 she shot documentary photographs of poor sharecroppers in rural South Carolina (for Esquire magazine). In 1969 a rich and prominent actor and theater owner, Konrad Matthaei, and his wife, Gay, commissioned Arbus to photograph a family Christmas gathering. During her career, Arbus photographed Mae West, Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Nelson, Bennett Cerf, atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Norman Mailer, Jayne Mansfield, Eugene McCarthy, billionaire H. L. Hunt, Gloria Vanderbilt's baby, Anderson Cooper, Coretta Scott King, and Marguerite Oswald (Lee Harvey Oswald's mother). In general, her magazine assignments decreased as her fame as an artist increased. Szarkowski hired Arbus in 1970 to research an exhibition on photojournalism called "From the Picture Press"; it included many photographs by Weegee whose work Arbus admired. She also taught photography at the Parsons School of Design and the Cooper Union in New York City, and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island.

Late in her career, The Metropolitan Museum of Art indicated to her that they would buy three of her photographs for $75 each, but citing a lack of funds, purchased only two. As she wrote to Allan Arbus, "So I guess being poor is no disgrace."

Beginning in 1969 Arbus undertook a series of photographs of people at New Jersey residences for developmentally and intellectually disabled people, posthumously named Untitled. Arbus returned to several facilities repeatedly for Halloween parties, picnics, and dances. In a letter to Allan Arbus dated November 28, 1969, she described these photographs as "lyric and tender and pretty".

Artforum published six photographs, including a cover image, from Arbus's portfolio, A box of ten photographs, in May 1971. After his encounter with Arbus and the portfolio, Philip Leider, then editor in chief of Artforum and a photography skeptic, admitted, "With Diane Arbus, one could find oneself interested in photography or not, but one could no longer . . . deny its status as art." She was the first photographer to be featured in Artforum and "Leider's admission of Arbus into this critical bastion of late modernism was instrumental in shifting the perception of photography and ushering its acceptance into the realm of 'serious' art."

The first major exhibition of her photographs occurred at the Museum of Modern Art in the influential New Documents (1967) alongside the work of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, curated by John Szarkowski. New Documents, which drew almost 250,000 visitors demonstrated Arbus's interest in what Szarkowski referred to as society's "frailties" and presented what he described as "a new generation of documentary photographers...whose aim has been not to reform life but to know it", described elsewhere as "photography that emphasized the pathos and conflicts of modern life presented without editorializing or sentimentalizing but with a critical, observant eye".

In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary of Arbus as part of the Overlooked history project. The Smithsonian American Art Museum housed an exclusive exhibit from April 6, 2018, to January 27, 2019, that featured one of Arbus' portfolios, A box of ten photographs. The SAAM is the only museum currently displaying the work. The collection is "one of just four complete editions that Arbus printed and annotated. The three other editions—the artist never executed her plan to make 50—are held privately". The Smithsonian edition was made for Bea Feitler, an art director who both employed and befriended Arbus. After Feitler's death, Baltimore collector G.H. Dalsheimer bought her portfolio from Sotheby's in 1982 for $42,900. The SAAM then bought it from Dalsheimer in 1986. The portfolio was put away in the museum's collection, until 2018.

Death

Arbus died on July 26, 1971, at the age of 48.

Legacy

"Arbus's work has had such an influence on other photographers that it is already hard to remember how original it was", wrote the art critic Robert Hughes in a November 1972 issue of Time magazine. She has been called "a seminal figure in modern-day photography and an influence on three generations of photographers" and is widely considered to be among the most influential artists of the last century.

In 1972, Arbus was the first photographer to be included in the Venice Biennale; her photographs were described as "the overwhelming sensation of the American Pavilion" and "an extraordinary achievement".

The Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective curated by John Szarkowski of Arbus's work in late 1972 that subsequently traveled around the United States and Canada through 1975; it was estimated that over seven million people saw the exhibition. A different retrospective curated by Marvin Israel and Doon Arbus traveled around the world between 1973 and 1979.

Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel edited and designed a 1972 book, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, published by Aperture and accompanying the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition. It contained eighty of Arbus' photographs, as well as texts from classes that she gave in 1971, some of her writings, and interviews,

In 2001–04, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph was selected as one of the most important photobooks in history.

Neil Selkirk, a former student, began printing for the 1972 MOMA retrospective and Aperture Monograph. He remains the only person who is authorized to make posthumous prints of Arbus' work.

A half-hour documentary film about Arbus' life and work known as Masters of Photography: Diane Arbus or Going Where I've Never Been: The Photography of Diane Arbus was produced in 1972 and released on video in 1989. The voiceover was drawn from recordings made of Arbus' photography class by Ikkō Narahara and voiced by Mariclare Costello, who was Arbus' friend and the wife of her ex-husband Allan.

Patricia Bosworth wrote an unauthorized biography of Arbus published in 1984. Bosworth reportedly "received no help from Arbus's daughters, or from their father, or from two of her closest and most prescient friends, Avedon and ... Marvin Israel". In 1986, Arbus was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum.

Between 2003 and 2006, Arbus and her work were the subject of another major traveling exhibition, Diane Arbus Revelations, which was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Accompanied by a book of the same name, the exhibition included artifacts such as correspondence, books, and cameras as well as 180 photographs by Arbus. By "making substantial public excerpts from Arbus's letters, diaries and notebooks" the exhibition and book "undertook to claim the center-ground on the basic facts relating to the artist's life and death". Because Arbus's estate approved the exhibition and book, the chronology in the book is "effectively the first authorized biography of the photographer".

In 2006, the fictional film Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus was released, starring Nicole Kidman as Arbus; it used Patricia Bosworth's unauthorized biography Diane Arbus: A Biography as a source of inspiration. Critics generally took issue with the film's "fairytale" portrayal of Arbus.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased twenty of Arbus' photographs (valued at millions of dollars) and received Arbus' archives, which included hundreds of early and unique photographs, and negatives and contact prints of 7,500 rolls of film, as a gift from her estate in 2007.

In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary of Arbus as part of the Overlooked history project.

Notable photographs

Eddie Carmel, Jewish Giant, taken at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, New York, 1970

Arbus's most well-known photographs include:

• Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, N.Y.C., 1963 – Wearing long coats and "worldlywise expressions", two adolescents appear older than their ages.
• Triplets in Their Bedroom, N.J. 1963 – Three girls sit at the head of a bed.
• A Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing, N.Y.C. 1966 – Richard and Marylin Dauria, who lived in the Bronx. Marylin holds their baby daughter, and Richard holds the hand of their young son, who is intellectually disabled.
• A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966 – A close-up shows the man's pock-marked face with plucked eyebrows, and his hand with long fingernails holds a cigarette. Early reactions to the photograph were strong; for example, someone spat on it in 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art. A print was sold for $198,400 at a 2004 auction.
• Boy With a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C. 1967 – With an American flag at his side, he wears a bow tie, a pin in the shape of a bow tie with an American flag motif, and two round button badges: "Bomb Hanoi" and "God Bless America / Support Our Boys in Viet Nam". The image may cause the viewer to feel both different from the boy and sympathetic toward him. An art consulting firm purchased a print for $245,000 at a 2016 auction.
• Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J. 1967 – Young twin sisters Cathleen and Colleen Wade stand side by side in dark dresses. The uniformity of their clothing and haircut characterize them as being twins while the facial expressions strongly accentuate their individuality. This photograph is echoed in Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining, which features twins in an identical pose as ghosts. A print was sold at auction for $732,500 in 2018.
• A Family on Their Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, N.Y. 1968 – A woman and a man sunbathe while a boy bends over a small plastic wading pool behind them. In 1972, Neil Selkirk was put in charge of producing an exhibition print of this image when Marvin Israel advised him to make the background trees appear "like a theatrical backdrop that might at any moment roll forward across the lawn.". This anecdote illustrates vividly just how fundamental dialectics between appearance and substance are for the understanding of Arbus's art. A print was sold at auction in 2008 for $553,000.
• A Very Young Baby, N.Y.C. 1968 – A photograph for Harper's Bazaar depicts Gloria Vanderbilt's then-infant son, the future CNN anchorman Anderson Cooper.
• A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in The Bronx, N.Y. 1970 – Eddie Carmel, the "Jewish Giant", stands in his family's apartment with his much shorter mother and father. Arbus reportedly said to a friend about this picture: "You know how every mother has nightmares when she's pregnant that her baby will be born a monster?... I think I got that in the mother's face...." The photograph motivated Carmel's cousin to narrate a 1999 audio documentary about him. A print was sold at auction for $583,500 in 2017.

In addition, Arbus's A box of ten photographs was a portfolio of selected 1963–1970 photographs in a clear Plexiglas box/frame that was designed by Marvin Israel and was to have been issued in a limited edition of 50. However, Arbus completed only eight boxes and sold only four (two to Richard Avedon, one to Jasper Johns, and one to Bea Feitler). After Arbus's death, under the auspices of the Estate of Diane Arbus, Neil Selkirk began printing to complete Arbus's intended edition of 50. In 2017, one of these posthumous editions sold for $792,500 in 2017.

Notable solo exhibitions

• 1967: New Documents. Museum of Modern Art, New York.
• 1972: Diane Arbus Portfolio: 10 Photos. Venice Biennale.
• 1972–1975: Diane Arbus (125 photographs, curated by John Szarkowski). Museum of Modern Art, New York; Baltimore; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Detroit Institute of Arts; Witte Memorial Museum, San Antonio, Texas; New Orleans Museum of Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Florida Center for the Arts, University of South Florida, Tampa; and Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign.
• 1973–79: Diane Arbus: Retrospective (118 photographs, curated by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel). Seibu Museum, Tokyo; Hayward Gallery, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England; Scottish Arts Council, Edinburgh, Scotland; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Lenbachhaus Städtische Galerie, Munich, Germany; Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Germany; Frankfurter Kunstverein; 14 galleries and museums in Australia; and 7 galleries and museums in New Zealand.
• 1980: Diane Arbus: Vintage Unpublished Photographs. Robert Miller Gallery, New York; Fraenkel Gallery, New York.
• 1983: Diane Arbus: Photographs. Palazzo della Cento Finestre, Florence; Palazzo Fortuny, Venice; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Milan.
• 1984–1987: Diane Arbus: Magazine Work 1960–1971. Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis; University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington; University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach; Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase; Wellesley College Museum, Massachusetts; and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
• 1986: Diane Arbus. American Center, Paris; La Fundacion "la Caixa", Barcelona, Spain; La Fundacion "la Caixa", Madrid; Robert Klein Gallery, Boston, MA; Light Factory, Charlotte, NC.
• 1991: Diane Arbus. Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto.
• 1992: Diane Arbus: The Untitled Series, 1970–1971. Jan Kesner Gallery, Los Angeles.
• 1995: The Movies: Photographs from 1956 to 1958. Robert Miller Gallery, New York.
• 1997: Diane Arbus: Women. Galleria Photology, London.
• 2003–2006: Diane Arbus: Revelations. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; CaixaForum, Barcelona; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
• 2004–2005: Diane Arbus: Family Albums. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts; Grey Art Gallery, New York; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas; and Portland Art Museum, Oregon.
• 2005: Diane Arbus: Other Faces Other Rooms. Robert Miller Gallery, New York.
• 2007: Something Was There: Early Work by Diane Arbus. Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
• 2008–2009: Diane Arbus, a Printed Retrospective, 1960–1971. Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; and Centre Régional de la Photographie Nord Pas-de-Calais, Douchy-les-Mines, France.
• 2009: Diane Arbus. Timothy Taylor Gallery, London.
• 2009–2018: Artist Rooms: Diane Arbus. National Museum Cardiff, Wales; and Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Nottingham Contemporary; Aberdeen Art Gallery; Tate Modern, London; Kirkcaldy Galleries; The Burton at Bideford.
• 2010: Diane Arbus: Christ in a Lobby and Other Unknown or Almost Known Works. Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; FOAM, Amsterdam.
• 2011: Diane Arbus: People and Other Singularities. Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, California.
• 2011–2013: Diane Arbus. Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris; Fotomuseum, Winterthur; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; and Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam.
• 2016–2017: diane arbus: in the beginning. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Malba, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• 2013: Diane Arbus: 1971 – 1956. Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
• 2017: Diane Arbus: In the Park, Lévy Gorvy, New York.
• 2018: Diane Arbus: A Box of ten photographs, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
• 2018: Diane Arbus Untitled, David Zwirner Gallery, New York.
• 2019: Diane Arbus: In the Beginning, Hayward Gallery, London.
• 2020: Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956–1971, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

Collections

Arbus's work is held in the following permanent collections:

See also

In Spanish: Diane Arbus para niños