So many people are rising today to celebrate the charms of diversity. That of bodies, skin colors, cultures. Often keeping many intolerances in their heart of hearts, but that’s another story… Powerful contemporary current, all the same, the one that makes people seek beauty outside the frames. Upstream, certain artists equipped with antennas had already seized these trembling zones where nothing is fixed. “Because the beautiful is only the beginning of the terrible”, wrote the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke a century ago.
The American Diane Arbus, who posed her camera a lot in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, is one of those visionaries, capturing those in whose path no one would turn around, except sometimes to make fun of them. “Because the ugly is only the beginning of the splendid”, she seems to respond in echo to the author of Duino Elegies.
Born Nemerov, daughter of a wealthy Jewish family of Russian origin, she had emancipated herself alongside her artist husband, Allan Arbus, soon immortalizing figures of banality or otherness, in Washington Square Park or elsewhere. This photographer from the zone and the margins was to commit suicide in 1971, after achieving late fame in 1967, thanks to the famous collective exhibition New Documents at MoMA in New York. But photographs, even as unusual as his, were not yet highly rated on the American art market. His real fame was posthumous.
The fact remains that many young people hardly know it, nor part of the general public. His quest for meaning hidden behind appearances nevertheless joins the fears of our time. An opportunity to better discover it is offered to Montrealers.
“She saw things that others didn’t,” Mary-Dailey Desmarais, director of conservation at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, told us this week before the press meeting. In front of us, on the picture rails: some 90 works in black and white with silver gelatin, sometimes flagship, sometimes unknown, produced between 1956 and 1971, on square format, watch us. A striking exhibition, mainly from the Art Gallery of Ontario, host to a remarkable corpus of Arbus’ photographs. On view until January 29.
I have always tasted the integrity of the brilliant gaze of this photographer. Her famous identical twins, dressed in the same way (Identical Twins1967), Kubrick was inspired by it for his shining, recalled the curator of the exhibition, Sophie Hackett. “What is identity? seems to be asking DianeArbus. We find it there before our eyes. Because one twin is dominant and happy, the other seems more anxious. It is no longer the similarities of these little girls that overwhelm us, but the individuality of each. The way the photographer penetrated the psyche of her models is a political act…
Here we are far from the cult film Freaks by Tod Browning (1932), where people with disabilities held key roles in a circus, reduced above all to their physical malformations, as freaks. Her subjects, Monsieur and Madame Tout-le-Monde, also people with Down’s syndrome or physically handicapped, find their full humanity under each of her clicks.
To believe that this young couple of short stature, this prostitute, these transvestites, this woman with a bushy beard want to talk to us. A thin little boy in Central Park (1962), a plastic grenade in his hooked hand, stretches his claws, his mouth twisted, his gaze filled with mute threats. A heavily tattooed man in a carnival hypnotizes the viewer with his hallucinated pale eyes. Today, street photography is more regulated than in its time, but Arbus came into contact with his models before sketching them, hence this dialogue with the camera.
It is America on the verge of losing innocence, then tipping towards its gloomy face, which is reflected in its photos; his tinsel dream slung over his shoulder. Through portraits of transvestites, nudists at home, corpses in the morgue, Santa Clauses at the school of the trade, the fractures of society are revealed. Young Puerto Rican women in New York seem to feel as little included in the Big Apple as in West Side Story.
I love the passerby with the improbable hat, the musician James Brown adorned with curlers, the almost blind eyes of the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges contemplating Central Park. Ordinary people, couples like there are so many, exhibit their singularity together. “What is ceremonial and curious and mundane will become legendary,” predicted Arbus before the age of social media. Never would this great artist have felt so well understood as today.