Feet, Wall Street

Lisette Model

1940–41 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Originally a student of the avant-garde Viennese pianist Arnold Schoenberg, Model began making photographs in Paris in 1933. Two years later, the French periodical Regards published selections from her first series, Promenade des Anglais, a satirical look at middle-class tourists on the French Riviera that foreshadowed the brash, confrontational style that would become her trademark. Her emigration to America in 1938 inspired two additional series, Reflections and Running Legs, from which this piece is drawn. The unusual, "belly-down" perspective, as well as the grainy, overwrought appearance of the print, evokes the hurried pace and overwhelming cacophony of Wall Street at rush hour and recalls the atonal experiments of her early musical training in Vienna.

Artist

Lisette Model

Date

1940–41

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1988