AMY ARBUS, AFTER IMAGES

Griffin Museum of Photography • Winchester, MA • griffinmuseum.org • Through June 2, 2013

Amy Arbus, David and Sam/After Café, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

It may be surprising that Amy Arbus’s After Images are photographs, not paintings. There is no mistaking them for her previous series, On the Street and The Fourth Wall. In this new series, she’s turned a corner that, she confesses, is a “real departure.”

The pervasive mood of these works is sad and melancholy. Although vastly different in style and character from the work of her mother, Diane Arbus, these photographs express a similar sensibility. Unlike Diane’s contemporary subjects, Amy’s images in this series reach into another era and become a lifeline between past and present, between painting and photography.

The twenty-four photographs shown have a rich, painterly quality that is dazzling. Many of them were inspired by iconic paintings by artists Arbus admires, particularly Picasso and Modigliani, and also Cézanne, Munch, Balthus, David, Courbet, Schiele, Seurat, and Regnault, The idea, she says, was “to get to know their paintings intimately.”

Working with a stylist, two lighting assistants, a makeup artist, actors, dancers, and models, she has created a startlingly beautiful group of luminous photographs with a surface so velvety it appears to be brushed. The photographs were created by using gels and soft lighting; painted clothing, various props, and specific backgrounds. Like her Fourth Wall pictures of Broadway actors in costume photographed offstage, the After Images photographs have both costumed characters and drama. Because the props and costumes were painted, the actors colored with makeup, and the sophisticated lighting effects designed, the photographs vividly evoke the original paintings they reference. Even the actors and models who posed for Arbus resemble the subjects of the originals.

Arbus looks to emotionally dark paintings, because, she says, “it’s the kind of work I find moving.” The images related to Picasso’s Blue Period are saturated with blue, like the ones he painted in his early years. David and Sam/After Café captures the down-and-out denizens that frequented the cafés of Bohemian Paris. The painted emaciated body of the woman in Sam/After Ironing is poignant, like Picasso’s painting, which does not romanticize the poverty of life in Le Bateau-Lavoir, where many great artists lived before they became famous. Nina/After Jeanne, suffused in shades of brown and sienna, is a tribute to Modigliani. Libby/After Thérèse is a potent reference to Balthus.

—Deb Forman