Diane Arbus started taking pictures in the early 1940s and went on to study photography with Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch and later, Lisette Model. Her first published photographs appeared in Esquire in 1960. In 1963 and 1966 she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1967, she was one of three photographers to be included in the landmark exhibition, New Documents, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. A year after her death she was the first American photographer to have work selected for inclusion in the Venice Biennale.
Read MoreThe Museum of Modern Art hosted a major retrospective that travelled through the United States and Canada from 1972–1975. In 2003, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organised Revelations, a full-scale retrospective that then toured to museums in the United States and Europe, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2005–2006). In 2009, the National Museum Cardiff presented an exhibition of Arbus’s works as part of the Artist Rooms collection created by Anthony d’Offay.
The most recent retrospective, Diane Arbus, began at the Jeu de Paume, Paris in 2011, travelling to the Fotomuseum, Winterthur; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; and Foam, Amsterdam, through 2013.
Arbus’s work has been surveyed in substantial publications, including: Diane Arbus (Aperture, 1972); Magazine Work (1984); Untitled (Aperture, 1995); Diane Arbus Revelations (Jonathan Cape, Random House, 2003); and Diane Arbus: A Chronology (Aperture, 2011).
Diane Arbus was born in 1923 in New York City, where she died in 1971. Public collections include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Text courtesy Timothy Taylor.
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Related Press 'In the beginning': Diane Arbus' early works go on show at the Met Breuer 15 July 2016, Wallpaper* 'I don’t press the shutter. The image does,' Diane Arbus once said. 'And it’s like being gently clobbered.' That softly smothering sensation, at once mellow and menacing, pulses through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition of Arbus’s early work. On view until 27 November at the Met Breuer, Diane...
Related Press Photography Is An Art And Always Will Be 13 December 2014, Sean O'Hagen for The Guardian / 11 December 2014 Imagine, if you will, the following scene. I pop into the National Gallery to view the 2014 BP National Portrait Award and look in bemusement at the exhibition, which is mostly comprised of rather old-fashioned paintings. It’s an uninspiring show, a hotchpotch, as are most exhibitions drawn from open submissions. Inexplicably enraged by this...
