Forty-One False Starts (25 page)

The title derives from a marginal scribble in a letter Arbus wrote in 1968 to Peter Crookston, an editor at the London
Sunday Times
, about a book of photographs she wanted to produce but “which I keep postponing.” “The working title . . . is
Family Album
,” she told Crookston, and went on, “I mean I am not working on it except to photograph like I would anyway, so all I have is a title and a publisher and sort of sweet lust for things I want in it.” In the same letter, Arbus delivered herself of her famous line: “I think all families are creepy in a way.”

In the perceptive essays they have written for the accompanying book, John Pultz, associate professor of art history at the University of Kansas, and Anthony W. Lee, associate professor of art history at Mount Holyoke, both begin by quoting Arbus's marginal scribble—and then go on to write the way they probably would anyway, taking up such subjects as (Pultz) the magazine culture of the fifties and sixties and (Lee, in a longer essay) postwar Jewish-American identity, cold war culture, the influence on Arbus of Walker Evans and August Sander, and John Szarkowski's promotion of photography as a modernist art form. Their efforts to connect everything they say to the family-album theme—to the idea that Arbus's mature work reflects a special obsession with the family—are ingenious but not always persuasive. Don't we all have families, and aren't we all obsessed with them on some level?

There are two parts to the
Family Albums
exhibition and book. The original idea had been to show only the Matthaei pictures. But this was thought “too narrow” (as the director of the Mount Holyoke museum, Marianne Doezema, put it to me) by the university presses approached to do the book, so a mollifying extra group of pictures was tacked on—photographs of Mae West, Bennett Cerf, Marguerite Oswald, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Tokyo Rose, and Blaze Starr, among others, that Arbus took for
Esquire
in the sixties. Unlike the Matthaei pictures, the
Esquire
pictures are not unknown. They appeared in a book called
Diane Arbus: Magazine Work
(1984), edited and designed by Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel, though this time without art. What has never been seen before are the contact sheets from which the published
Esquire
photographs derive.

It is fascinating to peer at the many pictures Arbus took of each celebrity and to ponder and even sometimes question the choices she (or the editors) made. Unfortunately, however, one can do so only if one attends the exhibition, for as the book was going to press, the Arbus Estate made one of its characteristic moves of repression. Lee and Pultz were obliged to pull the contact sheets of the
Esquire
pictures from their book. (The show, evidently, is out of the reach of the estate and the
Esquire
contact sheets remain in it.)

As if this prepublication tsuris weren't enough, the younger Matthaei daughter, Leslie, suddenly decided she didn't want any pictures of herself published. This forced Lee and Pultz to remove from the book every print and contact image in which Leslie appears, alone or in a group. Here, perhaps even more urgently than with the
Esquire
contacts, it is advisable to see the show for what it reveals about Arbus's photographic practice.

In the section of his essay devoted to the Matthaei commission, Anthony Lee, a little cruelly perhaps, elaborates on the celebrity Konrad Matthaei enjoyed when Arbus came to photograph him and his kin in December 1969. Matthaei, Lee writes, “was becoming an enormous mover and shaker on the New York theater scene, was intimate with the city's, indeed the country's, most famous stage actors and actresses, and was held as a fast-rising star whose good fortune was only beginning.” His town house, Lee notes, was filled with eighteenth-century French furniture and paintings by Monet and Renoir; he and Gay regularly appeared in newspaper and magazine society columns. Lee cannot resist quoting from a clipping that the guileless Konrad had produced from his files: “Mr. Matthaei wears a fitted double-breasted suit by Pierre Cardin, brown with a purple over-check, and a lavender shirt and tie. ‘I was heavily Paul Stuart oriented,' he wryly remarks, ‘before I discovered Cardin.' ”

The uncut Matthaei contact sheets straightforwardly tell the story of Arbus's two-day-long struggle with her commission. Family gatherings are no place for photographers of even minor ambition. The photographs they yield are necessarily messy, shapeless, unbeautiful. The photographs Arbus took of the Matthaeis and their relatives at the dinner table and in decorous horseplay in the living room are no different from the photographs today's Instamatic cameras have made it unnecessary to hire professional photographers to take. Arbus tried to put a little order into her pictures by posing family members in a row on a sofa over which the Monet hung or in groups in one of the ornately draped windows. But these images, too, are indistinguishable from the worthless snapshots some annoying relative can always be counted on to take at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Finally, Arbus began taking people off in pairs or alone to other parts of the house to photograph against plain backgrounds. She took some pictures of a girlishly dressed older woman, Konrad's mother, who in other circumstances might have given Arbus good value for her ongoing project of documenting, as she put it, “the point between what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing about you.” But the older Mrs. Matthaei was clearly not the person with whom to pursue this dangerous inquiry. When she posed alone for Arbus, Arbus simply accepted Mrs. Matthaei's idea of herself as a woman with a nice smile and good legs. This left the children. With them Arbus was finally able to solve the koan of how to please the family and not disgrace herself as an artist. Her quarry was the two daughters. She had already used up a roll of film on little velvet-suited Konrad, Jr., posing for her on his free-form rocking horse and never ceasing to look banally cute. Marcella and Leslie, ages eleven and nine, in their white party dresses, held out the greatest promise of pictures that would not give offense but might be Good.

When I went to see the Mount Holyoke show, I naturally sought out the missing pictures of Leslie and immediately understood why she had not wanted them preserved in a book. Leslie, an attractive girl, is the disobliging daughter, the Cordelia of the shoot. In almost every photograph, she sulks, glares, frowns, looks tense and grim and sometimes even outright malevolent. In his discussion of the Matthaei commission, Lee quotes an account Germaine Greer gave Patricia Bosworth of a photographic session with Arbus that

developed into sort of a duel between us, because I resisted being photographed like that—close-up with all my pores and lines showing! She kept asking me all sorts of personal questions, and I became aware that she would only shoot when my face was showing tension or concern or boredom or annoyance (and there was plenty of that, let me tell you), but because she was a woman I didn't tell her to fuck off. If she'd been a man, I'd have kicked her in the balls.

Lee goes on to write that “unlike Greer, neither Gay nor Marcella Matthaei recalls wanting to kick Arbus in her balls,” but Leslie might recall otherwise: her resistance to Arbus's project is almost palpably evident. Arbus's too-niceness didn't do its usual work on this thorny girl. Leslie hated every moment of being photographed. In one exceptional moment, Arbus extracted a reluctant smile from the girl. She stands next to her sister—who also looks amused—in an uncharacteristically relaxed pose, with her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her short white satin sheath dress. Something pleasant has passed between the girls and Arbus.

But pictures of pretty, smiling girls were not what Arbus was after. Marcella gave Arbus what Leslie refused her. The two portraits of Marcella that Lee and Pultz reproduce in the book are true Arbus photographs. They have the strangeness and uncanniness with which Arbus's best work is tinged. They belong among the pictures of the man wearing a bra and stockings and the twins in corduroy dresses and the albino sword swallower and the nudist couple. Like these subjects, Marcella unwittingly collaborated with Arbus on her project of defamiliarization. The portraits of Marcella—one full-figure to the knees, and the other of head and torso—show a girl with long hair and bangs that come down over her eyes who is standing so erect and looking so straight ahead of her that she might be a caryatid. The fierce gravity of her strong features further enhances the sense of stone. Her short, sleeveless white dress of a crocheted material, which might look tacky on another girl, looks like a costume from myth on this girl. To contrast the pictures of balky little Leslie with those of monumental Marcella is to understand something about the fictive nature of Arbus's work. The pictures of Leslie are pictures that illustrate photography's ready realism, its appetite for fact. They record the literal truth of Leslie's fury and misery. The pictures of Marcella show the defeat of photography's literalism. They take us far from the family gathering—indeed from any occasion but that of the encounter between Arbus and Marcella in which the fiction of the photograph was forged.

How Arbus got Marcella to look the way she did (a way no real-life eleven-year-old girl looks), how she elicited from her the magnificent grotesquerie by which the portrait is marked, remains her artist's secret. From Lee's interviews and correspondence with Gay, Konrad, and Marcella Matthaei, he gathered that Arbus's manner with the family was “pleasant but reticent” and that “she did not interrogate or interact with her subjects—in fact, barely spoke to them.” The close-up portrait of Marcella is reproduced on the cover of
Family Albums
and on the various announcements relating to the book and the exhibition. Walter Benjamin's famous notion in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that works of art lose their aura once it becomes possible to reproduce them does not apply to photography itself. On the contrary, each time a photograph is reproduced it acquires aura. Even a photograph of no special distinction will take on aura if it is reproduced over and over again. The distinguished portrait of Marcella—hidden from the world's view for thirty years—gleams out of Arbus's photographic universe like a new star.

*
Letter to Allan Arbus and Mariclare Costello, January 11, 1971.

*
Letter to Allan Arbus and Mariclare Costello, January 31, 1971.

*
For example, the modest book of photographs accompanying the 1971 Walker Evans show at MoMA (the one Arbus found so boring) contained a single essay by John Szarkowski; the grand book accompanying the 2000 Walker Evans show at the Metropolitan Museum contained six essays.

EDWARD WESTON'S WOMEN

2002

 

In 1975 I wrote a review of a retrospective of Edward Weston's photographs at the Museum of Modern Art for
The New York Times
. I was allowed an illustration, but the one I chose—the well-known pear-shaped nude, a starkly abstract study of a woman's bottom—was considered too racy by the
Times
of that time, and I was obliged to accept a staid substitute: a seated female nude in which the model had so arranged her body that nothing of it showed but bent legs and thighs and arms and the top of an inclined head. A few years later, I had occasion to look at that staid picture again and to see with amusement something I and obviously the
Times
had not noticed in 1975: if you look very closely at the intersection of the woman's thighs, a few wisps of pubic hair are visible. I had been led to this discovery by the photograph's model, Charis Wilson
*
, Weston's second wife, who wrote a remembrance of Weston in a book of his nudes published in 1977, and recalled of the picture that “he was never happy with the shadow on the right arm, and I was never happy with the crooked hair part and the bobby pins. But when I see the picture unexpectedly, I remember most vividly Edward examining the print with a magnifying glass to decide if the few visible pubic hairs would prevent him from shipping it through the mails.”

The photograph was taken in 1936. In 1946, when the Modern gave Weston his first retrospective, it was still against the law to send nudes showing pubic hair through the mail, and the museum seriously debated whether to show any of Weston's nudes at all. (It finally took its life in its hands and showed them. Nothing happened.) Weston's biographer, Ben Maddow, quotes Weston's satiric letter to Nancy and Beaumont Newhall of the Modern's photography department, “re ‘public hair' ” (as he liked to call it): “By all means tell your Board that P.H. has been definitely a part of my development as an artist, tell them it has been the most important part, that I like it brown, black, red or golden, curly or straight, all sizes and shapes. If that does not move them let me know.”

Weston's bitter jest contains a truth evident to anyone familiar with his history. Weston's erotic and artistic activities are so tightly interwoven that it is impossible to write of one without the other. It is known (from Weston's journals) that most of the women who posed for his nudes and portraits—arguably his best work—slept with him (usually after the sitting) and were sources for him of enormous creative energy.

Margrethe Mather, the first of these all-important models, was, as Maddow writes of her, “a small, very pretty, and exceptionally intelligent woman . . . mostly, though not wholly, a lesbian,” and a mysterious, elusive object of desire: “Edward Weston fell desperately in love with her. The sons [by his then wife, Flora] remember barging noisily into the studio darkroom in search of dad, to find him locked in embrace with Margrethe; but she would let things go no further, and this semi-platonic relationship tormented him for nearly ten years.”

At the time, Weston was living in the Los Angeles suburb of Tropico, earning his living as a studio portrait photographer and striving, with his after-hours work, to make a name for himself in the world of art photography. Mather's delicate Garboesque beauty and ineradicably sad expression made her an ideal subject for the soft-focus, painterly style in which Weston then worked. His longing for Mather—which was finally and rather mystifyingly fulfilled on the eve of his two-year-long trip to Mexico with another love—has been a fixture of writing about Weston, as has the question of her influence on his work. (“It is . . . difficult to ascertain the undoubtedly strong influence on Edward Weston's photographic ideas of a very bright and neurotic woman, whom he not only photographed, but eventually made his partner at the studio,” Maddow writes of Mather.) Unfortunately, the document that might have cleared these matters up—a journal kept by Weston during the years of his association with Mather—was destroyed by him in 1923 in a moment of self-disgust. A few months later, Weston repented of his act, writing in a new journal: