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Richard Avedon: Portraits

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Marilyn Monroe, actress, New York City, May 6, 1957. Richard Avedon (American, b. 1923). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. TM 2002 Marilyn Monroe LLC by CMG Worldwide Inc. www.MarilynMonroe.com. © Richard Avedon.

More about This Exhibition
One hundred eighty portraits by acclaimed photographer Richard Avedon—a vast collective portrait of America in the second half of the twentieth century—are on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 5, 2003. "Richard Avedon: Portraits" features his most classic and penetrating images, documenting as never before this artist's dazzling reinvention of the genre of photographic portraiture. The exhibition spans Avedon's entire career, from his earliest portraits made in the late 1940s through his most recent work.

Available online is the accompanying publication's foreword, an essay by the exhibition's curators, a special image presentation, and audio clips featuring the voices of Richard Avedon, Marian Anderson, the exhibition's curators, and others.

Philippe de Montebello, director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art commented: "Richard Avedon's work now takes its proper place in the larger history of art, representing the culmination of the time-honored tradition of public portraiture. Much like the great nineteenth-century French photographer, Nadar, whose telling portraits of rare individuals captured the creative genius of his generation, so Avedon, a century later, collected the key players and directed them in a brilliant portrait of an era that was questioning, unruly, and self-consciously alive, like all periods of radical growth. We are honored to share this estimable achievement with our audiences."

Maria Morris Hambourg, curator in charge of the Metropolitan's Department of Photographs and the organizer of the exhibition, noted, "By dint of progressive challenges to himself, Richard Avedon has not only distilled photographic portraiture to its irreducible core, but has also produced an extended meditation on life, death, art, and identity. Laureate of the invisible reflected in physiognomy, Avedon has become our poet of portraiture."

About Richard Avedon

Exhibition Highlights

Marlborough Gallery Exhibition, 1975

Portraits of Actors and Performers

The Family

In the American West

Other Works on View

Educational Programs

Book Foreword, Essay, and Special Image Presentation

Exhibition Publication

Exhibition Organizers and Credits

About Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon was born in 1923 in New York City. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, but never completed an academic education. In 1942 he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine Photographic Department and, when he returned, attended the Design Laboratory taught at The New School by legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch. As a staff photographer for Harper's Bazaar and later for Vogue, Avedon became well known for his stylistically innovative fashion work, often set in vivid and surprising locales. In 1992 he was named the first staff photographer in the history of The New Yorker.

Avedon's success in fashion photography is widely recognized. (In 1956 his brilliant early career was fictionalized in the Hollywood musical Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire as the fashion photographer "Dick Avery.") Unlike the fashion work, however, most of Avedon's portraits did not issue from commercial assignments but from personal convictions and were solicited by the artist himself. Each is a virtuoso reckoning with human complexities and contradictions and a powerful expression of this artist's distinctive vision.

With uncompromising directness, Avedon portrays his subjects against a bright, white, seamless background, with no props or extraneous details to distract from their person—from the essential specificity of face, gaze, dress, and gesture. When everything extraneous is stripped away, what remains is a remarkable intensity of characterization. The people in Avedon's photographs seem posed to walk right out of their frames, immediately recognizable and wholly alive down to the most telling detail.

Exhibition Highlights
Among the highlights of "Richard Avedon: Portraits" are stunning portrayals of twentieth-century artistic, intellectual, and political figures including Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote, Charlie Chaplin, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Marian Anderson, Willem de Kooning, and many others; a series of portraits of the artist's father in the years just prior to his death; and portraits of the unsung citizenry from the artist's series In The American West. The exhibition also features Avedon's mural-size group portraits of: Andy Warhol and the members of the Factory (1969), the coterie of artists, filmmakers, and performers who comprised the avant-garde bohemia of the day; the Mission Council (1971), military and political leaders who determined policy in regard to the Vietnam War; and the Chicago Seven (1969), a group of activists on trial for conspiring to incite an anti-war riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Other portraits on view include W. H. Auden (1956); Dorothy Parker (1958); J. Robert Oppenheimer (1958), the astronaut Gus Grissom (1961); Marcel Duchamp (1968); the pianist Oscar Levant (1972); William S. Burroughs (1975); Samuel Beckett (1979); Francis Bacon (1979); and the poet Joseph Brodsky (1991).

Marlborough Gallery Exhibition, 1975
At the core of "Richard Avedon: Portraits" is a group of photographs originally displayed in the artist's landmark exhibition held at the Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1975, which the artist has donated to the Metropolitan Museum. Featuring such luminaries as Ezra Pound, Igor Stravinsky, Isak Dinesen, Jean Genet, and Buckminster Fuller, these iconic portraits constitute a modern-day pantheon of many of the most influential figures of the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Among the highlights of this group are the three spectacular murals—The Factory, the Mission Council, and the Chicago Seven—which range from twenty-one to thirty-five feet wide. "Richard Avedon: Portraits" makes this groundbreaking body of work, first shown nearly three decades ago, available to a broader audience and a new generation of viewers.

Dr. Hambourg, exhibition organizer, commented: "These are pictures of famous people that are not at all about their celebrity. In their exchange with Avedon, each person yields up aspects of his or her interior self, some usually hidden but essential traits. Exactly how the photographer makes visible these fundamental conditions is the mystery of his genius. Collectively, he is addressing our greatness and frailty, the glory and heartbreak of what he calls 'the human predicament.'"

Portraits of Actors and Performers
Early in his career, Avedon was drawn to actors and performers—people with a highly developed, vocational understanding of the face as mask. Among these early portraits are silent movie masters Buster Keaton (1952) and Charlie Chaplin (1952); Marian Anderson performing with the Metropolitan Opera (1955); and Bert Lahr as Estragon in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1956). With Marilyn Monroe, Avedon pursued the mysterious point of convergence between the private self and the public role; his famous 1957 portrait reveals her underlying pathos and foreshadows the tragic figure she would later become in the popular imagination.

The Family
Featured in this exhibition is Avedon's The Family, a group of sixty-nine photographs of heads of state, union leaders, bankers, and media moguls—a composite portrait of the power elite—published as a special issue of Rolling Stone in 1976. Although his innate sympathies were with the dispossessed and his liberal politics are woven into his work in subtle and not so subtle patterns, with this series Avedon scrupulously tried to avoid expressing any opinion about his sitters, preferring to let them pose themselves so that his own bias would not skew the results.

In the American West
"Richard Avedon: Portraits" features a selection of works from the artist's ambitious series, In the American West. In these boldly scaled portraits of truckers, oil workers, and drifters, Avedon created a compelling record of the fiber—hard, caring, frayed, and resilient—of common American characters. Here, too, Avedon discloses a humane gravitas in his subjects, as if recognizing that quality as their essential—and essentially private—condition.

Other Works on View
A sequence of portraits of the artist's father, Jacob Israel Avedon, was taken at intervals in the years and months before his death in 1973. Presented in its own room, this profoundly moving suite of images captures the poignancy and reverberating power of the death of all fathers.

Avedon's portraits of artists and intellectuals from the last twenty years of the century—including John Cheever (1981), Roy Lichtenstein (1993), Harold Bloom (2001), and Lee Friedlander (2002)—complete this artist's collection of individuals who have shaped our world, and who have survived life's struggle through their generous gifts.

Educational Programs
The Metropolitan Museum is offering a variety of programs in conjunction with the exhibition, including a lecture by art critic Owen Edwards, a special program featuring Richard Avedon and Adam Gopnik, public lectures, gallery talks, films, and teacher workshops. See the online calendar for details.

An Audio Guide tour featuring the voices of many of the people portrayed in the photographs is also available.

The Audio Guide program is sponsored by Bloomberg News.

Book Foreword, Essay, and Special Image Presentation
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Web site is pleased to feature an essay by Maria Morris Hambourg and Mia Fineman from the exhibition publication, Richard Avedon: Portraits (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2002), available in the online Met Store. The essay, entitled "Avedon's Endgame," is presented in its entirety, along with the book's "Director's Foreword" by Philippe de Montebello. Online visitors may also enjoy a special presentation of images and accompanying text from the Museum's exhibition galleries and audio clips featuring the voices of Richard Avedon, Marian Anderson, the exhibition's curators, and others.

Exhibition Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated book of the same title (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2002) with essays by Richard Avedon, and Maria Morris Hambourg and Mia Fineman. With its innovative accordion-style design and superb reproductions, the book functions as a virtual stand-alone mini-exhibition in its own right. It is available in the Museum's bookshop and in the online Met Store.

Exhibition Organizers and Credits
"Richard Avedon: Portraits" was organized by Maria Morris Hambourg, curator in charge, with Mia Fineman, research associate, both of the Metropolitan's Department of Photographs. The exhibition design was by Jeffrey L. Daly, chief designer, in consultation with Gregory Wakabayashi of Welcome Enterprises, Inc. and Lea Ciavarra and Richard Nisa of Lubrano Ciavarra Design. Graphic design was by Sue Koch, graphic designer, and Gregory Wakabayashi; lighting was by Zack Zanolli, lighting designer. Conservation work for the exhibition was directed by Nora Kennedy, Sherman Fairchild Conservator of Photographs.

Photograph Credits