NEW YORK — People have been getting Diane Arbus wrong for so long and in so many ways that you could devote a lifetime to analyzing what all the false projections reveal — not about Arbus, but about her critics.
It is now 50 years since the Museum of Modern Art staged the posthumous retrospective that established the Arbus legend. In re-creating the retrospective at its West 20th Street gallery in New York’s Chelsea, David Zwirner (collaborating with Fraenkel Gallery) has the cultural event of this fall on its hands.
Before Arbus took her own life in 1971, she made photographic portraits of society women, crying babies, nudists, people with developmental disabilities and people wearing masks, as well as sex workers, twins, individuals with dwarfism, teenage couples and cross-dressers. Or, as her brother, the poet Howard Nemerov, put it, “freaks, professional transvestites, strong men, tattooed men, the children of the very rich.” (The show’s promotional image fits that last category: It’s Arbus’s brilliant photograph of journalist Anderson Cooper as a baby, his sleeping face uncannily resembling a death mask.)
The 1972-1973 Arbus show, then the most highly attended one-person show in MoMA’s history, operated like a depth charge — initially in the rarefied world of art photography (a disputed category in those days) and then in the culture at large. Few people had heard of Arbus while she was alive. Then suddenly, within a year of her death at 48, everyone knew her, everyone had a strong opinion and — perhaps most notably — no one doubted that photography could be art. “People went through that exhibition as though they were in line for Communion,”John Szarkowski, a MoMA photography curator who championed her work, once commented.
The Zwirner display is ingenious. Itenacts the problem (a surfeit of commentary, a fire hose of controversy) and then magically sheds it. As you walk into the gallery, you behold a wall covered with excerpts from writings about Arbus:
“Arbus’s work shows people who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as horrible, repulsive, but it does not arouse any compassionate feelings.”
“Her subjects are all flesh, they have very few resources — they don’t have a lot of mind.”
“[Arbus] shows us people, so locked into their physical and mental limitations, that their movements are meaningless charades. They are losers almost to a man.”
“In photographing dwarfs you don’t get majesty and beauty. You get dwarfs.”