Window at 5th Ave. was made just two years after Lisette Model, an influential street photographer and teacher, arrived in New York from Vienna by way of Paris. It belongs to her Window Reflections Series, the first body of work she made in her adopted city, which aptly conflates the bustle of the streets with the glamour of luxury goods. Her training in piano with Arnold Schoenberg, the father of a childhood playmate, echoes throughout the series. Schoenberg devised the twelve-tone technique, a method of composing in which all twelve notes of the chromatic scale (all white and black keys within an octave) are used equally, thus avoiding emphasis on one note and granting an allover quality to the piece. Model’s photographs from the Window Reflections Series share this compositional approach: an equal number of visual tones creates a similar allover effect.
Born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern to a wealthy Viennese family in 1901, Model was raised in her mother’s Catholicism rather than her father’s Jewish faith. She was fully engaged in classical music as a young person, practicing with private tutors almost daily, with the idea of becoming a musician. She studied both piano and voice with Schoenberg in 1920−21 in Vienna, and moved to Paris in 1926 to fully devote herself to voice. She gave up music for painting in 1933, then a year later took up photography, which she learned from her younger sister Olga and the photographer Florence Henri. In 1934, while visiting her mother in Nice, she made a series of portraits along the Promenade des Anglais that are among her most celebrated, featuring extreme close-ups of men and women lounging in chairs, smoking cigarettes, and reading the newspaper.
Model began teaching photography in 1951 at the New School, alongside Berenice Abbott, Minor White, and Alexey Brodovitch; her students included Diane Arbus, Larry Fink, Todd Webb, and Peter Hujar. Among her students she cultivated open critique, a pedagogical approach that can be attributed to her most influential teacher, Arnold Schoenberg.
Rebecca Morse, Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department
2024
