Part One: A Decisive Moment
When
choosing topics to write about for this blog, my ideas come from various
sources. Sometimes there’s an idea
that’s interested me for a long time and I think about it for months before I write
about it. Sometimes I find an idea and
write the post quickly. I choose the
topics, they don’t choose me. That was
not the case for this post, however.
One unexpected image, found at a time I was not expecting it, catapulted
me into months of research and discovery that now culminate here. To begin, some background is in order.
My own artwork requires me to research art history quite frequently, so that’s
where this post begins. I was at my
campus library, researching a topic completely unrelated to what I’m discussing
here. Specifically, I was researching
the infamous Terracotta Warriors that were once believed to be stellar examples
of ancient Etruscan art. It turned out
they were forgeries, though, and the case gave the Metropolitan Museum of Art (who
bought them believing them to be authentic) a curatorial black eye. I was hunting through old books looking for
color photos of the sculptures, focusing on books about the Metropolitan
Museum’s collection. I was having no
luck when I saw Thomas Hoving’s Making
the Mummies Dance on the library shelf.
Hoving
was the Met’s outspoken director for many years, and he also wrote an excellent
book on art forgery called False
Impressions, so I knew he was well versed in the Etruscan warrior
case. Even though Mummies is more about his time running the Met in the 60s and 70s
(the sculptures had been exposed as forgeries years earlier) I figured it was
worth a shot. I quickly flipped through
the photos included in the middle of the text and saw a picture that literally stopped
me in my tracks. All thoughts of forged
antiquities evaporated as I glimpsed a shockingly familiar face in a grainy
photo. My immediate reaction was “I know
that woman”. The photo in question
(reproduced below) was taken by Leonard Freed:
 |
| I was not able to find a clear reproduction, but even at this resolution the dress in pretty distinct. |
The
reproduction was of low quality but there was no mistaking that I had seen her
(and her zigzag dress) before. Not in a
vague, half-remembered sort of way, either.
I could remember exactly where and when I had first seen her. Namely, here:
This
photo is by Garry Winogrand and clearly shows the same woman wearing the same
dress (the same man is next to her in both photos too, by the way). It was
taken during the Centennial Ball held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (it’s
one of several photos from that event that Winogrand made). The photo has gone by different titles (from the
descriptive Centennial Ball, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, to simply Untitled), but almost every source I
found, both in print and on-line, date the picture to 1969 (something I take
issue with, but more on that later in the post).
