Diane Arbus: the scalpel eye

The title of  Diane Arbus’s Sanctum Sanctorum (Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and David Zwirner Books, New York, 86 unnumbered pages, $55) is ironic: not a Holy of Holies but a Chamber of Horrors.  Since this handsome volume has no text, only 44 photos from 1961 to 1971 plus captions, it’s essential to describe the character of the famous photographer.

Diane Arbus (1923-71) was a self-destructive sexual adventurer, angry and rebellious, driven and ambitious.  She had lifelong incestuous relations, from adolescence until just before her death, with her older brother, the poet Howard Nemerov.  But she treated her deepest and most forbidden emotional connection as if it were a casual affair.  Extremely competitive and often unpleasant, she rebelled early on against her traditional, wealthy background and was poor for most of her life.  Arbus described herself as propelled by “an almost pathological need to have it all” and confessed, “I get hysterical, fierce, like I’ll try anything to get my way.”  She suffered from extreme depressions, had nervous breakdowns and ultimately committed suicide.

Arbus set out to shock and focused on deformity and ugliness.  She admitted that she would assume a fake and ingratiating persona, lie to and deceive her weird-looking, even freakish subjects, in order to get them to submit to her outrageous and often degrading demands.  She had done extensive field work and was seriously interested in compiling “an atlas of penises; she marveled at the inexhaustible variations in them.”  She had the ability to combine the ordinary with the strange and monstrous, and expressed anguished feelings with macabre humor.

In Arbus’ pictures babies are screaming, children repulsive, young couples grotesque, old people hideous.  She shot all manner of wretched outcasts: strippers, carnival performers, sword swallowers, tattooed men and dwarves; nudists, homosexuals, lesbians, cross-dressers, female impersonators and the mentally ill.  She exposed their weirdness and adorned them with strange props, bizarre makeup and grotesque costumes.  Her brutal, full-frontal close-ups intensify people’s physical imperfections and reveal what they might normally wish to hide.

The elderly film star Mae West looks like the clapped-out madam of a brothel.  Standing up and slightly leaning to the left, she faces the viewer with her eyes half-shut, mouth open and lips twisted.  The contrapposto candlestick at her side reflects her uneasy posture.  She wears a garish blonde wig and long white, low-cut gown, clasps her hands behind her head and has gigantic fur cuffs at the end of her sleeves.  The drapery behind her broad bed looks like a theatre curtain that has fallen after the final performance.  As Samuel Johnson wrote, “Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee.”

By contrast to the old Mae West, Arbus portrayed the 19-year-old actress Mia Farrow, a TV star two years before she married Frank Sinatra.  Her bed is made, her room is neat and uncluttered, the décor pleasant, the subject relaxed.  She wears a childish flowered bra and frilled panties.  Facing the viewer, she sits on a soft-quilted bed clasping her hands, with her knees touching, lower legs spread and feet bare.  She seems both Lolita-like and vulnerably virginal.

Diane Arbus: Mia Villiers-Farrow On A Bed, 1964

Norman Mailer, wearing a three-piece suit and tie, is sprawled on a soft chair with his arms and legs spread, a cigarette in his right hand.  He seems bleary-eyed and drunk, but tough and defiant.  Mailer remarked that Arbus emphasised extreme behavior and changed common perceptions about strange people: “Giving a camera to Diane is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.”

Diane Arbus – Norman Mailer at home,

The Blind couple, lying on the expanse of a wide bed, cling warmly and comfortably to each other.  A bright light they cannot see beams through the window behind them and reflects on the man’s shiny shoes.  Absorbed with one another, they seem oblivious to the passing of time measured on the old-fashioned radio clock they can feel with their hands.

Diane Arbus – Blind couple in their bedroom

The most miserable of all Arbus’ wretched subjects are the female impersonators and hideously unconvincing transvestites.  Female impersonator on bed fails to look female, despite wearing a wig and a spare one perched on the radiator, and having spangled girly dresses hanging next to her.  Her bare chest is flat, her thick legs bent, her expression sullen.  Her stage name, Rita Joy, is roughly scratched on the wall behind her.  The barred window seems to prevent her escape from a wretched existence.  The Seated man in a bra and stockings rests in a leather chair on a wooden floor and faces the viewer with a sad countenance.  He has dark hair, a narrow face with a heavy beard, flat chest, crossed legs, thick thighs and long feet.  His partial transformation is pathetic.  A naked man being a woman stands stripped between drawn curtains and faces the viewer with his genitals hidden under his thighs.  His eyebrows are raised, his face made up with white cream and lipstick. He poses with one hand touching his hip, the other his thigh; his right knee is bent, his right foot raised.  His clothes are scattered on the bed and floor, and a six-pack of beer sustains him.

The Couple on a mattress in tangled sheets are having sex. The man—an amorous bird of prey—is supported by his outstretched arms, kneels into her mass of pubic hair and lifts his buttocks high in the air.  The ecstatic woman, with eyes closed, head bent and chin up, is holding his cock.  Woman with her baby monkey sits facing the viewer on a boldly patterned couch and beneath a Venetian blind with bent slats.  She has bangs, a long slightly tilted face and wears a white blouse under a dark suit.  Her hands touch the prehensile paw and hairy leg that protrude from its mummy-like wrap.  She protectively cradles the tiny captured simian, as if it were her own baby. The young girl in her early twenties, Sitting on her bed with her shirt off, has a huge turban of wild curly dark hair cascading down to her eyebrows, pointed nose, thin lips, tiny breasts, hairy arms, dirty fingernails and grim, resentful expression.  She doesn’t want to be the way she is.

In Couple with their adolescent daughter at a nudist camp their rough-hewn cabin is stark and bare, furnished by two beds on either side, the man’s white shirt hanging behind them and a photo of a film star pinned to the wall.  This sansvestite middle-aged husband has a severe expression, wrap-around tan, pot belly, dependent genitals, white socks and shoes.  His wife, standing beside him with a forced smile, is adorned with a watch, wedding ring and hairy legs. Their tense, squeamish daughter, naked with pointed breasts, sits on the bed beside them with a mournful look that seems to ask: “why have you trapped me here?”  Unlike the idealised nude bodies of Adam and Eve in Western art, the photo emphasizes the man’s brown, cigar-like cock and the woman’s drooping dugs.

The three Russian midgets attempt to look normal with their housedresses, aprons and sensible shoes.  The bespectacled man on the left and the woman on the right lean toward the hefty matriarch in the middle.  Their reflections appear in a tall triple-mirror jammed with photos; their room is cluttered with a pussy-cat lamp and other tchotchkes.  The claustrophobic setting intensifies their squashed bodies and wide, wrinkled Slavic faces.  A seated Mexican dwarf in a close-up, fortified by the liquor bottle at his elbow, wears a cheap tilted hat and pencil-mustache to camouflage his thick upper lip.  Brown-skinned and bare-chested, his thick torso cut off at the waist, he reveals his stunted arms and stubby fingers.  He allows three toes of his hidden leg to creep out from under a white towel, like a frightful little animal.  His massive head and defiant expression challenge the viewer to deny his right to exist.

Diane Arbus – Russian midget friends in a living room

Alienated and isolated, Arbus’ people intensify each other’s misery and reflect the sick American society of the 1960s.  Her bizarre, fascinating subjects resemble the victims in Edgar Poe’s stories and the agonised creatures in Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream.

Jeffrey Meyers has published Painting and the Novel, Impressionist Quartet, biographies of Wyndham Lewis and Modigliani, and a book on the Canadian realist painter Alex Colville. 

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