Model, Lisette (1901–1983)

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Model, Lisette (1901–1983)

Austrian-born photographer. Name variations: Elise Seybert; Lisette Stern. Pronunciation: Moh-DELL. Born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern on November 10, 1901, in Vienna, Austria; died on March 30, 1983, in New York City; daughter of Victor Hypolite Josef Calas Stern, later Seybert (a Viennese doctor), and Françoise Antoinette Felicite (Picus) Stern (a French clerk); married Evsei (Evsa) Konstantinovich Model (a Russian painter), on September 7, 1937, in Paris; no children.

Moved to Paris (1926); immigrated to United States (1938); had first works purchased by Museum of Modern Art (1940); signed contract with Harper's Bazaar (1941); became American citizen (1944); began teaching at New School for Social Research (1951); awarded Guggenheim fellowship (1965); had portfolio published (1977); Camera magazine devoted December issue to her work (1977); had second portfolio published (1979); held exhibitions in Tokyo, Ottawa, Venice, Australia, Paris, and Germany (1980–81); had retrospective at Parsons Exhibition Center, New York City (1983).

Selected works:

"Promenade des Anglais" (series, 1934–35); "Famous Gambler" (1938); "Reflections" (series, 1940); "Running Legs" (series, 1941); "Coney Island Bather" (1941); "Wall Street Banker" (1941); "Lower East Side" (series, 1941–47).

The photographic images created by Lisette Model, much like the artist herself, were often controversial, contradictory, and political in nature. Her pictures explored the social landscapes of both pre-World War II Europe and postwar America, and probed the inner landscapes of the subjects of her portraiture. Despite her lasting fame as a photographer in the United States, and to a lesser extent in her native Europe, no fulllength biography has chronicled her unique life, and much of the reason for this lack lies with Model herself. She discouraged most potential biographers, and those projects which she did support were doomed to failure because of constant "revisions" she made in her life story. She refused to give the same account twice.

Model was born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern on November 10, 1901, into a wealthy bourgeois family in Vienna. She was the second of three children of Victor Stern, a Jewish doctor of the imperial army, and Felicie Picus Stern , who as a young woman had left her homeland of France to work at the Austrian court. A native of Vienna who also held extensive lands in Italy, Victor was a well-educated man who passed on to his children his enjoyment in collecting books and playing classical piano. Felicie was a devout Catholic, and baptized her children into the Catholic Church despite her husband's Jewish faith. When Lisette was about a year old, Victor had the family name legally changed to the non-Semitic Seybert; an attempt to mitigate personal repercussions from the growing anti-Semitism in Austria and across Europe, such changes of name were a common occurrence among European Jews during the years preceding 1914.

The economic disasters following World War I brought financial ruin to many Austrian middle-class families, and in comparison to many of their fellow Austrians the Seyberts' sufferings were not great. They were forced to give up many luxuries they had previously taken for granted, but they retained enough capital to ensure a good education for the children and to afford travel and various other pastimes. Lisette and her siblings Olga and Salvator were instructed at home by private tutors, learning to speak Italian and French along with their native German. Acquaintances of the family remembered Lisette as a girl who usually kept to herself, but one who also loved to create imaginative tales and entertain others by acting them out. There is speculation that she may have been sexually molested by her father; friends characterize her descriptions of her childhood as painful, even unbearable at times, in relation to her father, and her tendency toward behavior that was alternately introverted and melodramatic may point to some sort of abuse. As a photographer, Model often justified her invasions of privacy of the poor, who were the subjects of her work, on the grounds that she, too, had known want and suffering.

At age 17, Lisette began serious study of the piano with composer Edward Steuermann, and in 1920 she entered the Schwarzwald School, a private institution for girls which encouraged creativity and exploration of the arts while preparing students for the intellectual rigors of university studies. She remained there as a part-time student for two years, developing a strong passion for music, particularly piano and voice, and dreaming of becoming a concert pianist or a professional singer. At no point during this period did she show interest in the field of photography or any of the visual arts; music was to be her means of artistic expression until she entered her 30s.

At Schwarzwald, Lisette's principal instructor was Arnold Schonberg, a gifted composer and former Expressionist painter under whom she studied harmony, instrumentation, counterpoint, and musical analysis. He also introduced her to the vibrant world of Austria's then-flourishing avant-garde art scene, and she embraced the broader notions of art in its new and revolutionary forms, as biting social criticism and radical political statement. The influence of Schonberg and his contemporaries can be seen in much of Model's later photographic work; as the Expressionists did, her pictures were to satirize her culture, questioning its values and ethics, and to explore the emotional and psychological workings of the human mind. Nonetheless, she would show an ambivalence towards her privileged education, as she would with many aspects of her life. In later years, she often proudly denied having received any formal art education, justifying her statement by the fact that she had not been a full-time pupil at Schwarzwald (although she had studied there for two years under one of Austria's most gifted composers). At other times, she claimed to have studied at the state-run Austrian Gymnasium, which favored strict discipline over fostering creativity.

In 1924, Model began voice studies with Marie Gutheil-Schoder , a gifted singer who was also a friend of Arnold Schonberg. In June of that year, Victor Seybert, whose health had been deteriorating since a diagnosis of cancer and severe depression in 1917, died at age 58. Even during the last phases of his illness, he had struggled to protect the family's wealth, and had been successful in investing what remained of their fortune in an Italian pharmaceutical company. Two years later, Felicie Seybert decided to return to her native France. Model and Olga accompanied her, while Salvator, who was married and ill with tuberculosis, remained in Vienna. When Felicie and Olga decided to leave Paris to settle on the Cote d'Azur in Nice, Model chose to remain behind and continue her voice lessons.

In Paris, where she lived alone for the next ten years, Model was the eager student of Marya Freund , a Polish soprano and celebrated voice teacher who preferred the "new" musical genres and who was also an associate of Schonberg. During this time, in which she supported herself through the family money, Model demonstrated a growing political identity as well as independence of spirit, but she also underwent several years of psychoanalytic treatment (which has been taken as further evidence of some deep childhood trauma). While she freely chose to make Paris her home, she later recalled the years there from 1926 to 1933 as a time of great loneliness. Apart from her singing lessons, she spent considerable time in various Parisian bistros or wandered the streets, and often visited her mother and sister in Nice.

In 1933, despite an obvious and acknowledged talent, Model abandoned her voice lessons and stopped dreaming of becoming a professional singer. She never fully explained her reasons for this unexpected change, sometimes placing the blame on "inadequate" teachers and at other times on not feeling comfortable in the music environment of Paris; her sister and friends have suggested that she lacked the discipline, and even sufficient natural ability, for such a career. Whatever the reasons, her rejection of the medium that had long been her passion was sudden and complete, and left her, at age 32, in search of other forms of expression.

For a time she studied painting with landscape painter Andre Lhote. Although he had also instructed the photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Hoyningen-Huene, it was her sister Olga who truly introduced Model to photography. Olga's interest in photography dated back to childhood, and after moving to Nice she had worked as an apprentice photographer at several studios before becoming a medical photographer in the emerging field of micrography. In 1934, Olga taught her sister basic photographic and darkroom skills. Model soon began using her camera to photograph Parisian streets, and the diverse people who inhabited them, as well as family and friends. That same year, she began to see her fledgling hobby in terms of a career, as a result of a conversation about the deteriorating political situation in Europe with fellow ex-Schonberg student Hanns Eisler. A Marxist, composer, and collaborator with Bertolt Brecht, Eisler was in self-imposed exile from Berlin after the Nazi Party's rise to power. He warned that Adolf Hitler's ideology, and the rising tide of fascism, made it dangerous for anyone to be a left-wing artist in Europe with no job training or survival skills. With, indeed, no job training, and dependent for survival on her family's wealth, Model decided to become not an artist but a photojournalist.

That same summer, while staying with her mother, she took a series of photographs of pedestrians along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Her subjects were the idle rich—American, Russian, and French—and a perfect match to her awareness and interests: people similar to her in background, richly costumed and secure in their wealth, but alien to her in terms of their values. Intensely aware of their positions of privilege even as she denied her own, Model brought an intimate awareness to the portraits, several of which were published the following winter in the radical Marxist journal Regards. Under her images of the "Promenade des Anglais" appeared captions criticizing the "ugly middle class" who "loll in white armchairs … boredom, disdain, the most insolent stupidity and sometimes brutality mark these faces." Although Model often denied a deeply leftist political outlook, she undoubtedly knew the context in which these images would be used when she agreed to their publication in Regards.

Model increased the pace of her work after this first public exposure of her photographs. While still fascinated by the theme of the idle and arrogant rich, she also turned to capturing images of street people, beggars, and the blind as they struggled to survive in Paris and Nice. Seen together, these disparate images provide a glimpse into the wide class distinctions of 1930s France.

The art of the split second is my means of exploring.
—Lisette Model

Around this time, in either Nice or Paris, she met Evsei Model. Born in 1899, Evsei, called Evsa, was a Russian Jew from a wealthy family who emigrated before the Russian Revolution to avoid being drafted into the army. He had traveled to China, Japan, Singapore, Bombay, and the Middle East before landing in Italy and then in France, where he studied painting and graphic design. From 1927 to 1930, he had operated a combined art gallery and bookstore in Paris, exhibiting his own works there as well as in other Parisian galleries. After the bookstore closed, he had continued his artistic work in both Paris and Nice. Evsa moved in with Lisette in February 1936, and occasionally traveled with her on the extended trips to the Italian cities of Milan, Trento and Pamparato she often was required to make in the late 1930s to oversee her family's investments. Her work was already attracting the interest of numerous agents, and by late 1936 she sold several more photographs.

Lisette and Evsa were married in a civil ceremony in Paris on September 7, 1937, and the following spring decided to emigrate to the United States. With the rise of fascism leading Europe toward the brink of international war, they were both highly vulnerable, since neither Lisette, who was half-Jewish, nor Evsa, a Jewish refugee, held French citizenship. In August 1938, Model withdrew what money she could from Italy. They received their visas for departure in September and on October 8 arrived in New York City.

Model fell in love at once with the vibrant, crowded and active city; both she and Evsa began producing works reflected their new sources of inspiration. Still captivated by the energy of city streets, Model often photographed in Wall Street and on the Bowery, as well as in the city's cabarets and cafes. She created many images in 1939, although, true to her contradictory nature, she usually claimed in interviews that she did not use her camera for her first 18 months in America. She and her husband made many friends in the artistic community, and these friends acted as contacts for the couple as they sought new audiences for their work. In 1940, when Model was introduced to photographer Ansel Adams and photohistorian Beaumont Newhall, she already counted among her acquaintances the photographers Berenice Abbott and Ralph Steiner, photography critic Elizabeth McCausland , and Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary art director of Harper's Bazaar. She was fascinated by the study of deliberately created images, and began photographing the window displays on Fifth Avenue and other retail areas, exploring the theme of American glamour. In an interview, she noted: "I found that America was the country of making images of everybody, everything. Everything had to have an image. … One day I sitting in a kind of bar, and I saw a politician projecting his image, and I said to myself, 'Glamour, the image of our image—that is my project.'"

Model found a much greater market for her photographs in New York than she had in France, but by 1940 the capital she and Evsa had been living on was running out. When she approached the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for a job as a darkroom technician, Beaumont Newhall, now the curator of the museum's nascent department of photography, was so impressed by examples of her work that he told her the museum would rather buy her prints than hire her. "First Reflection," part of her series on windows and one of her best-known images, became the first of many of her works which MoMA would acquire over the course of 26 years.

In December 1940, a selection of Model's "Reflections" photographs appeared in Cue magazine, and "French Scene" (which had also been acquired by MoMA) was included in the exhibition "Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Aesthetics," marking the creation of MoMA's Department of Photography. The first of her photographs to be exhibited in the United States, it secured her reputation, and in the following year her images would appear in a variety of shows and magazines. In January 1941, seven pictures from the "Promenade des Anglais" series appeared in PM's Weekly illustrating "Why France Fell." Her "Running Legs" series—all images of legs and feet on the sidewalks of New York—was published and reviewed in US Camera in February, and in May a solo exhibition opened at the New York Photo League. In July, her "Coney Island Bather," shot on assignment, illustrated the article "How Coney Island Got That Way" in Harper's Bazaar. The photo's subject, an overweight woman in a bathing suit on the beach at Coney Island, received considerable criticism from Harper's readers who found the subject matter distasteful. In October 1941, "Wall Street Banker" appeared in Complete Photographer magazine.

In 1942, when World War II was well under way, Model spent considerable time photographing on New York's Lower East Side, often within the neighborhood's restaurants and bars. Images from this period appeared in US Camera and Harper's Bazaar. When their status as aliens and their Jewish backgrounds brought both Lisette and Evsa under suspicion from the federal government that year, Model was forced to request letters from her professional acquaintances attesting to her political neutrality and moral character. Perhaps as a means of proving her non-partisanship, she began to photograph war rallies, and several of these images were published in the November issue of Look magazine. Her photographs, on a variety of themes, appeared in photographic and general interest magazines, primarily Harper's Bazaar, throughout the 1940s.

In July 1944, when she and Evsa received their naturalization papers, she legally changed her first name from Elise to Lisette. In October of that year, they received word that her brother Salvator and his wife had been deported from France to Germany, and that her mother was extremely ill with cancer. Amid the thriving New York art community, during the war years the Models lived mostly on what they could generate from sales and exhibitions, because the Seybert properties in war-torn Italy were providing no revenue. Felicie and Olga struggled in Nice, and at times were close to starving. Lisette and Evsa did what they could to support Felicie on their meager earnings, and tried to sell their existing works. In November 1944 came news from Europe that Felicie had died on October 21. Some three years later, Model would receive confirmation from Germany that her brother had died during the war in a Nazi concentration camp.

In 1946, with the war over, the Models traveled to San Francisco, where they spent a year becoming acquainted with artists and photographers working on the West Coast. That August, at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, an exhibition of Model's prints was held which featured portraits of some of the leading artists of the day, including surrealist painter Salvador Dali and photographers Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham , and Ansel Adams. (Many of these pictures would also appear in the February 1947 issue of Harper's Bazaar.) The trip strengthened Model's friendship with Adams, and the two would provide artistic support for each other for many years.

In New York again, in the spring of 1949 Model applied for a Guggenheim fellowship to create a book on New York City. Despite a recommendation from Adams and the exhibition of her work as part of the "Four Photographers" show at MoMA, her application was turned down. She and Evsa returned to the West that year to complete an assignment on Reno, Nevada, for Harper's, while 15 of her photos went on the road in MoMA's "Leading Photographers" traveling exhibition, which toured the country until 1954. From Reno, Model and her husband went on to California to visit some of his relatives, and in August she accepted a teaching position in documentary photography at the California School of Fine Arts. Students there recall her as an inspiring, demanding instructor who did not believe lectures could teach photography; it had to be learned, she said, by doing.

She returned with Evsa to New York City in 1950, and the following year began teaching at the New School for Social Research, a job she would hold until her death; she also gave private lessons to help support herself and her husband. Model was recognized as an outstanding teacher, one whose influence on her students would have assured her lasting recognition even if her own work had not earned her a place among the great modern photographers. She staunchly refused to show her own work in her classes, and, as she had at the California School of Fine Arts, frequently took her classes around the city on photography outings. Influencing everything from their attitude towards the medium itself to their choice of subject matter, she pushed many of her students into producing lasting images. The celebrated American photographer Diane Arbus , a student and close friend of Model's for many years, is one of many who viewed her as their most inspiring instructor and major artistic influence. Confrontational and harshly critical, she had a passion for her art that could arouse others to equal passion. Yet the demands that teaching placed on her time and energy decreased the time she could devote to her own photography. From 1952 to 1956, she worked sporadically on a book of photographs of jazz musicians, for whom she had conceived a great admiration during her first months in New York in the 1930s, but the book was never completed due to lack of funds. While most of her time throughout the 1950s and 1960s was spent teaching, her work continued to appear in exhibitions and galleries around New York and Boston.

In 1965, on her second application, Model was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to photograph the people of New York City. During the 1960s and 1970s, her life was characterized by a lasting dedication to her students and to her work at the New School, although she found the time to create many new works of her own. These newer works appeared in exhibitions across the country, from New York to Washington, D.C., to San Francisco, and joined permanent collections from the Smithsonian to the National Gallery of Canada to the Philadelphia College of Art. In 1970, she was awarded a large grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation to prepare a study on modern photography, and in 1973 she received the Creative Artists Public Service Program award.

Although she continued to photograph and teach, after 1973 Model was semi-retired. In January 1976, Evsa, who had been forced to give up his successful painting career when his health began to decline in the late 1960s, suffered a massive heart attack. After months of painful illness, he died quietly at home that October. He had been Model's primary emotional support throughout their 39-year marriage, as she had been both his primary emotional and financial support. She said of him in a late interview, "He was life itself." Although she continued to lecture after 1976, her photographic output dwindled away; she had outlived most of her friends and many of her students, including Arbus, who had committed suicide in 1971.

In 1977, a portfolio of Model's images was published in book format by Graphics International; another portfolio-book, proposed by the publishers of Aperture magazine, was published in 1979. The years 1980 and 1981 saw the worldwide exhibition of her prints in Japan, Australia, Venice, Canada, Paris, and Germany. In 1982, Model made a trip to France, where she was awarded the Medal of the City of Paris in a ceremony celebrating her long commitment to her artistic vision and her contribution to modern photography. On March 4, 1983, she gave her last lecture, at Haverford College. Twelve days later, a retrospective of her life's work called Lisette Model: A Celebration of Genius, opened at the Parsons Exhibition Center in New York City. Late that same month, she entered New York Hospital, where she died on March 30, at the age of 82.