Getty Museum

[Circus Man, Nice]

Creator

American Photographer · 1901–1983

Artist

Lisette Model began her creative life as a student of music. Through avant-garde composer Arnold Schönberg, with whom she studied piano, she became exposed to the Expressionist painters of early twentieth-century Vienna. She never formally studied photography but took it up in the 1930s while living in Paris. An early piece of advice received from a colleague--"Never photograph anything you are no

More on Getty ULAN

Date: about 1937
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Culture: American
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

While visiting her family in Nice, a fashionable resort on the French Riviera, Lisette Model began a series of photographs of wealthy vacationers along the Promenade des Anglais and another series of photographs of the working classes in other parts of the city. This rear-view portrait of a circus performer is an unforgiving commentary on his generous proportions, exaggerated by Model's close cropping of the figure to fill the image's frame. The posts of the bench bisect him horizontally and vertically, dividing his body into neat sections of rounded pattern and texture. Identified only as a "Circus Man," the subject's anonymity is secured: not even an eyelash peeks out from the smooth, blank side of his face.

View at Getty Museum ↗

The authoritative record is held by Getty Museum. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.

Get printable QR codes

Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.

Open this page

See at Getty Museum

Related across collections

Semantically similar works from Getty Museum and other institutions.