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French Chris on the Convertible, NYC

Nan Goldin American
1979
Not on view
Following in the tradition of Robert Frank and Helen Levitt, Goldin is her generation's greatest practitioner of the "snapshot aesthetic" in photography-the intimate, diaristic mode that yields images that, in the right hands, are both spontaneous and carefully seen, tossed off and irreducibly right. In this early work, the artist has captured her friend as a Chatterton of the Lower East Side, lying across the back of a blue convertible with shirt open, eyes closed, and an empty can of Schaeffer beer by his side instead of arsenic-a contemporary vision of glamorous surrender for our own time.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: French Chris on the Convertible, NYC
  • Artist: Nan Goldin (American, born Washington, D.C., 1953)
  • Date: 1979
  • Medium: Silver dye bleach print
  • Dimensions: Mat: 25 × 32 in. (63.5 × 81.3 cm)
    Image: 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm)
    Sheet: 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm)
  • Classification: Photographs
  • Credit Line: Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2001
  • Object Number: 2001.336.1
  • Rights and Reproduction: © Nan Goldin Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
  • Curatorial Department: Photographs

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