A Big Gift for the Met: The Arbus Archives

By Carol Vogel, The New York Times

Two years ago gallerygoers had a chance to discover the personal side of Diane Arbus in a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to the portraits that made her famous—powerfully unsettling photographs of dwarfs, transvestites and everyday people—the Met filled librarylike rooms with her photographic equipment, pages from her diaries, books from her home and studio and family pictures.

Now the photographer’s estate has presented this intimate chronicle of Arbus’s life—her complete archives—to the Met as a gift, along with hundreds of early and unique photographs; negatives and contract prints of 7,500 rolls of film; and hundreds of glassine print sleeves that she personally annotated before her death by suicide in 1971....

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David Emerick

Featured Comment by John Sarsgard: "Very interesting. Arbus was closely associated with the Museum of Modern Art and John Szarkowski during her lifetime. In that time of fewer photographers and a closer community, she and her contemporaries frequently hung out at Szarkowski's office and mooched his coffee. Until the mammoth show two years ago, her New York exhibition history was all about MOMA and never MMA. I wonder what persuaded Amy and Doon to give it all to MMA? The Museum of Modern Art was really Diane's place."

Comments

[John MacKechnie]

Bravo!

[Bill Mitchell]

Times certainly change. It hasn't been that long ago since they rejected Georgia O'Keefe's offer of the Steiglitz archives.

[stephen connor]

Um, not to shake Bill Mitchell's world, but Georgia O'Keefe died in 1986. 21 years is a long time, even in my world.

[mcananeya]

I'll hazard a guess as to why the archives went to the Met rather than MoMA. I think there were probably two reasons:

(1) Without any hard numbers to back it up, I bet the Met gets significantly more visitors than MoMA. I'd also wager than the Met draws its audience from a wider cross-section of society than the MoMA. This isn't a value judgment, just a personal observation. In part, I think this is because the Met is a quasi-public institution. The City of New York owns all of the Met's buildings and pays for its heat, light and power. MoMA, while obviously a non-profit, is more of a private institution. This is reflected in their admission charges. MoMA has hard admission prices, whereas the Met only has "suggested" admission/contribution levels. You can visit the Met without paying a cent, if you want to. (You cheapskate!)

(2) Perhaps they felt that Arbus' archives would be more highly valued by the Met than by MoMA, given that the Met is trying to build up its photography collections.

Don't get me wrong, both are great museums, and ultimately, I don't really think it matters all that much which museum they go to. As John's comment indicates, what drew Arbus to MoMA was not necessarily MoMA the institution, but John Szarkowski (and possibly the coffee). That era has passed and without failing to appreciate John Szarkowski's contributions, we should be grateful that we live in an era when his work is bearing fruit and other museums are showing greater interest in photography. The important thing is that Arbus' archives are available to be seen and studied in New York.

Best,
Adam