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Disciple of the American Dream
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19877 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
1,454 Words |
| Author
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Lori Pauli
Lori Pauli is curatorial assistant in the Department of
photographs at the National Gallery of Canada. |
The catalog that accompanies the currently touring exhibition of photographs by Lisette Model features one of her more famous images on its cover. Titled Running legs Fifth Avenue, this photograph combines many of the elements that excited and inspired Model upon her arrival in America and, specifically in new York City. An elegant woman's leg blurred in full stride is set against a backdrop of two quintessential symbols of America--the automobile and the American flag. It is a photograph that celebrates movement and modernism and what Model saw as an American obsession -glamour.
Born in Vienna in 1901, Model was christened Elise Amelie Stern (the family name was changed to Seybert in 1903) and was the second child of an upper-middle-class family. In her twenties, Model studied music composition with the famous composer Arnold Schoenberg, and her early aspirations were to be a concert pianist. When her father died, Model moved with her mother and sister to Nice, but it wasn't until she settled in Paris in 1926 that she began her life as a photographer. Initially, Model went to Paris to take voice lessons; when her plans to be a concert singer collapsed, she heeded the advice of composer Hanns Eisler and took up photography as a way to arm herself for the uncertain times that approached with the threat of war. Her younger sister, Olga, taught her the rudiments of dark-room work while friends Rogi Andre and Florence Henri helped Model to formulate her "shoot from the gut" philosophy of photography. While here photographs of the bizarre features of exotic animals at the zoo reveal that her style was still tentative in these early days, Model was developing her own visual vocabulary.
Like the story of her own life, Model's selection of subject matter was fraught with contrasts and contradictions. Nowhere is this more evident than when one compares her photographs of lie on the Riviera with life on the streets of Paris. While her photographs of rich gamblers illustrated an aritcle ridiculing the life-styles of the bourgeeoisie, Model would later insist that in fact she never intended the satirical edge that people ascribed to her photographs. She argued that instead of trying to make some sort of statement about the privileged or the poor, she sought interesting faces and unusual shapes in the people she photographed.
In 1937 Lisette married the Russian painter Evsa Model. A year later, they traveled to New York, where they would remain for the rest of their lives. Both artists were immediately struck by the spectacle that was New York, although in an interview Lisette admitted to an initial disappointment
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