Diane Arbus & August Sander

Diane Arbus & August Sander

EDWYNN HOUK GALLERY, Zürich

November 17, 2011–January 14, 2012

1Agust Sander, Middle Class Children, 1925.

Up to their knees, they’re identical: laced-up leather boots, pale socks, paler legs, shadow-strewn knees. Then difference begins. On the left, ruffles become a dress. On the right, checked shorts become a white shirt, become a soft bow tie knotted under a boyish face. Soft bangs falling over his forehead, he’s morose. Bows in her hair, she smiles. The little boy and girl holding hands might be twins. But the similitude does not end there. Hung near this difference-parsing, class-identifying photograph by August Sander—an elegant gelatin silver print didactically titled Middle-class Children (1925)—are Diane Arbus’s equally indelible and strangely edifying black-and-white photographic investigations of singles, couples, twins, and triplets made some four decades later. See her famousTeenage Couple on Hudson Street, NYC with their oddly mature faces and diminutive child bodies, or Triplets in Their Bedroom, N.J. (both 1963). The identical sisters are clothed as such: starched white shirts buttoned to the neck like fundamentalists, white headbands bisecting their dark, curly hair. The straight lines of their mouths mimic the line of their eyebrows, running parallel to the sad line of their eyes. Their faces conjure a perversion of Madeline’s famous rhyme: “In three straight lines they broke their bread and brushed their teeth and went to bed.”

In a 1960 letter Arbus noted, “Someone told me it is spring, but everyone today looked remarkable, just like out of August Sander pictures, so absolute and immutable down to the last button.” That she knew the German photographer’s work so well, and used a metaphor of dress to describe the social and seemingly psychological state of his subjects as an analogy to those who surrounded her, is not surprising. The two photographers plumbed similar themes and formal motifs in their trenchant and treacherous bodies of work, despite their separation by time and place. Station, class, and identity were dissected through dress, design, and environment. The weirdness of social stratification and familial classification was made clear in repeated images of twins, couples, and families in the crux of “good” society and on the very fringes of it. Thus, this well edited, cogent exhibition pairing the two artists at Galerie Edwynn Houk, the new Zurich branch of the estimable photography gallery in New York, shouldn’t have been surprising. Yet it was: the lasting power and startling frankness of Sander’s and Arbus’s oeuvres, dissecting and delineating twentieth-century social mores and postures, left me more than a little moved.

to read more: http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/diane-arbus-august-sander/

2August Sander, Soldier, 1940.

3August Sander, Forester's Child, Westerwald, 1931.

4August Sander, Circus Artists, 1926–32.

5August Sander, The Dadaist Raoul Hausmann [with Hedwig Mankiewitz and Vera Broido], 1929.