It is tempting to approach a new exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago by paraphrasing Jane Austen’s famous opener in “Pride and Prejudice”: A man in possession of a camera must be in want of a model.
If the model is the man’s wife, well, what could be a more convenient arrangement? What could be more intimate, more familiar and more risky? What is brought to light when a photographer focuses his energy, his camera–and a great deal of his artistic genius–on his beloved?
“The Model Wife,” now on view at the Art Institute, goes a long way toward answering those questions.
A bonus of the show is its sweeping history of modern photography, but its intentions are certainly more visceral than academic. Not only does the exhibition document the photographer’s use of his wife as model, it reveals the nuances of marriage–some that span decades–and the sharp influences that such a partnership can have on artistic output.
Perhaps no other photographer in the exhibition shows how much output can be generated from a single subject as Seiichi Furuya does. His photographs trace spouse Christine Gossler’s emotional and mental deterioration.
Furuya’s camera followed his wife to the end, as a series of images from a contact proof show. In one of the frames a pair of shoes is seen neatly placed under an open window. In the next frame, a body lies face down on the ground.
Since his wife’s suicide in 1985, Furuya has spent almost every working day involved with the images he made of her and has produced three books based on them.
The other eight photographers whose works comprise this show–Baron Adolph de Meyer, Alfred Stieglitz (husband of painter Georgia O’Keeffe), Edward Weston, Harry Callahan, Emmet Gowin, Lee Friedlander, Masahisa Fukase and Nicholas Nixon–offer equally fascinating revelations about the ebb and flow of relationships, about those moments when love and art collide.
For the wives, the models, the show demonstrates their willingness to put into practice what true partnership is.
“All of these photographs represent a kind of collaboration,” says Colin Westerbeck, associate curator of photography at the Art Institute, as he walked through the gallery the day before the exhibition opened.
In the case of Callahan, Eleanor was essential to his art from 1947 to 1960, a time when he was teaching at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where many of his photographs were shot. He employed Eleanor as a “collaborator in his laboratory of invention,” according to the catalog “The Model Wife” (Bulfinch Press, $65). And she was a willing one indeed. Of photography’s presence in their marriage, Eleanor once said, “It was a part of our daily life for 25 years. . . . He took pictures of me wherever we happened to be.”
At its most elemental level, “The Model Wife” pulls the lid off one of the most private relationships, that between a husband and wife. But, it is the wife, alone in front of the camera, who exposes herself to the most scrutiny, perhaps the most risk.
Several of these model wives were photographed in unflattering light, at moments when they appear extremely vulnerable: Friedlander photographed wife Maria with his own harsh shadows striping her nude figure as she stood in a darkened bedroom; Gowin captured Edith sitting on an outdoor commode.
“The subject is aware she’s making a public statement about a private matter,” says Westerbeck, who designed the show’s presentation for the Art Institute.
To some, these moments will seem almost too private, and the viewer can be made to feel like a voyeur. Other photos–such as the one of Nixon’s wife, Bebe, sitting in a bathtub–draw the viewer so intensely into a couple’s inner sanctum that one is transfixed by the ordinariness of the moment.
What’s evident in these pictures is that the men who took them were quite taken with their subjects. For a number of the photographers, Westerbeck says, the word obsession applies. Judging from “The Model Wife,” it appears the artists’ muses indulged them well.
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“The Model Wife” runs through May 6 at the Art Institute of Chicago. For more information call 312-443-3600 or visit the museum’s Web site, www.artic.edu.
