Diane Arbus 1926-1971

Other prints of this image:

Diane Arbus (Aperture, 1972, in conjunction with retrospective exhibition originating at The Museum of Modern Art, New York), unpaginated

Diane Arbus: Revelations (New York: 2003, in conjunction with the exhibition originating at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), pp. 209 and 300-1

The print offered here comes from the collection of Philip Leider, the founding editor of Artforum magazine.  One of the few magazines to publish Arbus’s work as art during her lifetime, Artforum made the prescient decision to feature an Arbus image on the cover of its May 1971 issue, the Patriotic Boy with Straw Hat, Buttons, and Flag, Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade.  Inside the issue, on pages 64 through 69, an article entitled ‘Five Photographs by Diane Arbus’ reproduced five of the photographer’s signature images, each on its own page, along with a brief text written by Arbus herself.  The Arbus text, solicited by Leider, has been reproduced almost as often as the article’s photographs, which included the Identical Twins; Eddie Carmel, a Jewish Giant; Christmas Tree in a Living Room; Young Family in Brooklyn; and Lauro Morales, a Mexican Dwarf.    Among the often-quoted sentences from the May 1971 Artforum text is Arbus’s statement, ‘Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.  It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.’  Arbus’s full text is reproduced, and the Artforum issue discussed, in Revelations, pages 218-219.

Philip Leider was Artforum’s first editor, from 1962 to 1971.  In her comprehensive volume, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962 – 1974 (New York, 2000), Amy Newman charts Leider’s definitive role in shaping the magazine’s philosophical stance, the choice of art reproduced on its pages, and its decisive influence on contemporary art and criticism during the 1960s and early 1970s.  Founded in San Francisco in 1962, the magazine, and Leider with it, moved to Los Angeles in 1965, and then to New York in 1967.  As Newman describes in detail, it was Philip Leider’s rigorous critical standards that gave the magazine its authority in its first decade.

Philip Leider has described how he came to own a print of the Jewish Giant as follows:

‘Diane Arbus may not have had a very widespread reputation at the time I met her, but her work was extremely well-known within the art world.  It was, in fact, Henry Geldzahler, then the Met’s curator of twentieth-century art, who told me that Diane was preparing a portfolio [the Box of Ten Photographs] and might be interested in letting me have a look at it.

‘We met—Diane, Henry, and I—in her apartment, which I think was then in Westbeth.  The portfolio was stunning—I wanted to publish the whole thing in Artforum.  I recall Diane letting me look through boxes of amazing prints that were in the bottom of some closet, while she and Henry chatted.  I’m not certain, but I’m pretty sure that I asked Diane if she’d consider writing something to go in the magazine.  By that time, I’d come to realize that the best stuff I was publishing was being written by artists.  In any event, she wrote a beautiful short paragraph, which was all the text those photographs needed. . .

‘As the issue came together it wasn’t long before I realized that one of the photographs would be on the cover.  I had a lot of trouble deciding between the kid with the hand grenade or the boy in the straw hat.  In the end, I guess it was the zeitgeist that won out.  I think that Diane was surprised to find one of her photographs on the cover.  Some time after the issue came out, she called to thank me (she was thanking me!) and asked if I’d like one of the pictures.  Would I!  She asked me to pick one.  By that time, the Jewish Giant had supplanted the boy with the hand grenade in my affections, primarily, I think, because Diane had managed to get so accurately the stain on the mother’s housedress.  Not only did it remind me of my own and every other Jewish mother I knew, but the contrast with the suit and tie of the father told a whole story in itself. 

‘Every work of art I own has been given to me by the artist who made it.  Over the years, these works have been seen and discussed by hundreds of friends, visitors, and students, but nothing has come near the attention that the Jewish Giant has generated.  And the strangest thing is how awed people are, not so much by the fact that Diane made the print just for me, but, oddly, by the fact that I’d known her.  “You knew her?”  “You actually met her?”  No one has ever said anything like that when looking at the drawings or prints other artists have given me.  If I had to guess what they were really asking, I’d imagine it was something like, “You mean she looked at you with that eye?”’

Arbus’s well-known photograph of Eddie Carmel, the Jewish Giant, was made in 1970, although she had met and photographed Carmel and his parents some years before.  Patricia Bosworth relates that Carmel was eight feet tall, weighed 495 pounds, and had tried to earn a living in a number of ways.  He had sold mutual funds from an office on 42^nd Street; had auditioned for the lead in a Broadway show; and had attempted a television career, but was only able to get monster parts (Diane Arbus: A Biography, pp. 193-4). Some of Arbus’s earlier photographs of Carmel, who found work as the ‘World’s Biggest Cowboy’ at Hubert’s Dime Museum and Flea Circus, are reproduced in Revelations, page 153.  In the spring of 1968, Arbus wrote to Peter Crookston, an editor at the London Times Sunday Magazine, about potential subjects, as follows:

‘”One more thing, perhaps too exotic. . . I know a Jewish giant who lives in Washington Heights or the Bronx with his little parents.  He is tragic with a curious bitter somewhat stupid wit.  The parents are orthodox and repressive and classic and disapprove of his carnival career. . . They are truly a metaphorical family.  When he stands with his arms around each he looks like he would gladly crush them.  They fight terribly in an utterly typical fashion which seems only exaggerated by their tragedy. . .’” (quoted in Revelations, pp. 67 and 190).

In 1970, she returned to the subject of Eddie Carmel and his family, and on June 28, she wrote to Peter Crookston about the experience, “’I went back and did a picture I had wanted to do a few years ago for your family issue.  Marvelous’” (ibid., p. 209).   The ‘family issue’ to which Arbus refers is the November 10^th, 1968, issue of the Sunday Times Magazine, which included two other Arbus photographs, with text (see Lot 185).  

The decision to include a photographer’s work in Artforum in 1971 was significant not only for Arbus, but for the medium of photography as well.  Although Arbus’s work had previously been published in a number of magazines, from Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, to Sports Illustrated and Glamour, the photographs were usually made and published for editorial purposes, with explanatory text.  This changed with the Artforum issue.  The text provided by Arbus referred not to the photographs featured, but to photography itself.  The scale of the illustrations was full page, comparable to the full-page reproduction of a work by Robert Ryman in the same issue. 

Leider has described his decision to feature a photographer’s work in Artforum as follows:

‘For a large part of the time I edited Artforum, it was a basic tenet of modernist criticism that each art, if it wished to remain major, was faced with the task of paring itself down to what was unique to it, to what it shared with no other art.  In line with this, mixing painting and sculpture with theater, poetry, or photography was the last thing I wished to do in Artforum’s pages.  . . .

‘It was therefore with some hesitation that I entertained Henry Geldzahler’s suggestion that I consider giving space to a portfolio of photographs that Diane Arbus was putting together.  The debates raging around photography at that time—debates that often turned on whether photography was an art at all—seemed to me only distantly related to the concerns of an art magazine.  Though the subject of photography had begun to interest some of the magazine’s writers—not least because of the remarkable reputation that Diane Arbus had begun to acquire in the art world—I remained concerned about confusing issues facing modern painting and sculpture with those facing other enterprises.  I wasn’t sure there was a place for photography in a serious art magazine.

‘What changed everything was the portfolio [the Box of Ten Photographs] itself.  It then seemed to me that any definition of art that did not include such a body of work was fatally flawed.  It also seemed to me that Diane’s work accomplished for photography what we demanded be accomplished, under the needs of Modernism, for all arts: it owed nothing to any other art.  What it had to offer could only be provided by photography. . .  With Diane Arbus, one could find oneself interested in photography or not, but one could no longer, it seemed to me, deny its status as art.  And so, I felt, in featuring the portfolio, that Artforum was making a major statement not only about Diane Arbus, but about photography as well.’