Name: Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited
Start: 2022-09
Location: David Zwirner

Diane Arbus, Self-portrait with 35mm Contax D camera, 1959. Contact sheet, roll 614 #34 © The Estate of Diane Arbus. Image courtesy Diane Arbus Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

“A thing is not seen because it is visible, but conversely, visible because it is seen...”

—Passage underlined by Diane Arbus in her copy of The Works of Plato

Installation view, Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited, David Zwirner, New York, 2022

Best known for her disconcerting images exploring the intricate nature of what it means to be human, Diane Arbus is a pivotal and singular figure in American postwar art. Her bold black-and-white photographs demolish aesthetic conventions and upend all certainties. Both lauded and criticized for her photographs of people deemed “outsiders,” Arbus continues to be a lightning rod for a wide range of opinions surrounding her subject matter and approach.

Triplets in their bedroom, N.J. 1963

Gelatin silver print

Image: 15 x 14 3/4 inches (38.1 x 37.5 cm)
Sheet: 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Framed: 24 3/4 x 20 3/4 inches (62.9 x 52.7 cm)

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Installation view, Diane Arbus, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1972

Organized to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the artist’s 1972 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, this presentation brings together the iconic exhibition’s checklist of 113 photographs so that everyone can see what all the fuss was about.

The title of the exhibition at David Zwirner—Cataclysm—alludes to the immensity of the uproar spawned by the retrospective and the ferocity of the critical discourse around the artist that emerged then and continues to the present day.

Installation view, Diane Arbus, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1972

Tattooed man at a carnival, Md. 1970

Gelatin silver print

Image: 10 x 9 7/8 inches (25.4 x 25.1 cm)
Sheet: 14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
Framed: 20 3/4 x 16 3/4 inches (52.7 x 42.5 cm)

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Collaged archival materials featured in Diane Arbus: Documents, co-published by David Zwirner Books and Fraenkel Gallery, 2022. Order Now.

In the fall of 1971, in the aftermath of Arbus’s death in July, her friend, colleague, and fellow artist Marvin Israel approached John Szarkowski, the legendary director of photography at The Museum of Modern Art, about the prospect of a retrospective exhibition of her work. Szarkowski, who had begun championing Arbus’s photographs in the late 1960s, quickly agreed to do the show. Though admired and respected by an expanding coterie of photographers and artists, Arbus was not widely known at the time of her death.

Four people at a gallery opening, N.Y.C. 1968

Gelatin silver print

Image: 13 3/4 x 13 inches (34.9 x 33 cm)
Sheet: 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Framed: 24 3/4 x 20 3/4 inches (62.9 x 52.7 cm)

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Woman in a rose hat, N.Y.C. 1966

Gelatin silver print

Image: 10 3/4 x 10 1/4 inches (27.3 x 26 cm)
Sheet: 14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
Framed: 20 3/4 x 16 3/4 inches (52.7 x 42.5cm)

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When the exhibition opened, on November 7, 1972, no one, not even Arbus’s most fervent supporters, could have predicted its profound impact on museum visitors, nor the impassioned—at times vitriolic—critical response the exhibition would generate among writers and thinkers. It was the most-attended one-person exhibition in the museum’s history, with lines of visitors regularly stretching down the block. Szarkowski later recalled, “People went through that exhibition as though they were in line for communion.”

Child teasing another, N.Y.C. 1960

Gelatin silver print

Image: 8 3/4 x 6 inches (22.2 x 15.2 cm)
Sheet: 14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
Framed: 16 x 12 3/4 inches (40.6 x 32.4 cm)

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The Human Pincushion, Louis Ciervo, in his silk shirt, Hagerstown, Md. 1961

Gelatin silver print

Image: 11 1/4 x 8 inches (28.6 x 20.3 cm)
Sheet: 14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
Framed: 17 3/4 x 14 3/4 inches (45.1 x 35.6 cm)

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Installation view, Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited, David Zwirner, New York, 2022

Naturally, as in the case of the 1972 show, the current exhibition includes all the images Arbus selected for A box of ten photographs, her only portfolio, which she began work on in 1969, two years before her death. She completed the printing of eight sets of a planned edition of fifty, but despite her exhaustive efforts, only managed to sell four during her lifetime. These were acquired by Richard Avedon, Mike Nichols, art director Bea Feitler, and Jasper Johns. As Arbus wrote to her former husband, Allan, “the owners are out of Who’s Who. My confidence is absurdly on a roller coaster.”

Collaged archival materials featured in Diane Arbus: Documents, co-published by David Zwirner Books and Fraenkel Gallery, 2022. Order Now.

Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade by Diane Arbus, cover of Artforum, May 1971

Despite minimal sales at the time, the portfolio immediately triggered two highly consequential and precedent-breaking events. In May 1971, Artforum, which had never before permitted photographs in its pages, did a cover feature on the images in A box of ten photographs.

And at the 1972 Venice Biennale, showing photographs for the first time in its history, Arbus’s ten images at the American pavilion proved to be a sensation.

Installation view, Diane Arbus: A box of ten photographs, American Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 1972

In retrospect, the art world’s embrace of photography can be seen to have begun with Diane Arbus and these two events. Further, it was the immense and enduring critical and popular response to the 1972 retrospective and the simultaneous publication of the Aperture monograph Diane Arbus that secured photography’s legitimacy. As Hilton Als wrote, “An artistic breakthrough of this magnitude…almost always results in work that has cataclysmic significance for the audience.”

A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968

Gelatin silver print

Image: 12 1/2 x 12 inches (31.8 x 30.5 cm)
Sheet: 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Framed: 24 3/4 x 20 3/4 inches (62.9 x 50.8 cm)

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So much has changed since the 1972 show that, as is often the case with pivotal historical events, it is now almost impossible to conceive that the current status of photography as art was ever otherwise.

Collaged archival materials featured in Diane Arbus: Documents, co-published by David Zwirner Books and Fraenkel Gallery, 2022. Order Now.

The Junior Interstate Ballroom Dance Champions, Yonkers, N.Y. 1963

Gelatin silver print

Image: 14 3/4 x 14 3/4 inches (37.5 x 37.5 cm)
Sheet: 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Framed: 24 3/4 x 22 3/4 inches (62.9 x 57.8 cm)

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The nature of Arbus’s achievement is such that her work stands alone—isolated even from her chosen medium—as radical and inexplicable today as when it first appeared.

Collaged archival materials featured in Diane Arbus: Documents, co-published by David Zwirner Books and Fraenkel Gallery, 2022. Order Now.

What seems to have enthralled some and enraged others about Arbus’s work is how she unflinchingly illuminated the singularity of each of her subjects, which—paradoxically—linked them to one another and, by extension, to the viewer.

A woman passing on the street, N.Y.C. 1971

Gelatin silver print

Image: 14 1/2 x 12 5/8 inches (36.8 x 32.1 cm)
Sheet: 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Framed: 24 3/4 x 20 3/4 inches (62.9 x 50.8 cm)

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“This is what I love, the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life....I see the divineness in ordinary things.”

—Diane Arbus, age sixteen, in a high school essay on Chaucer

Installation view, Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited, David Zwirner, New York, 2022

Diane Arbus Documents

Through an assemblage of articles, criticism, and essays from 1967 to the present, this groundbreaking publication charts the reception of the photographer’s work and offers comprehensive insight into the critical conversations, as well as misconceptions, around this highly inﬂuential artist.

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