Portraits of Artists 1950s-1960s

Deborah Bell Photographs presents an exhibition of portraits of artists from 1950s and 1960s by the self-taught photographer Marvin P. Lazarus (American, 1918-1982). The exhibition features some 30 vintage prints of artists in their studios, including Alexander Archipenko, MIlton Avery, James Brooks, Stuart Davis, Giorgio di Chirico, Willem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp, Jimmy Ernst, Philip Evergood, Fritz Glarner, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Jack Levine, Man Ray, Conrad Marca-Relli, Joan Mitchell, Evsa Model, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Milton Resnick & Gino Severini. All prints are vintage gelatin silver prints made by the photographer and have not been exhibited for some 20 years. Lazarus was a lawyer and Assistant Attorney General of New York State who left his legal practice in 1962 to become a full-time photographer. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Lazarus would break away from his Manhattan office in order to photograph artists whose work he admired. He would plan his vacations in Europe around artists he wished to photograph. Many of these portraits of American and European painters and sculptors of the Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art eras were published during the 1960s and 1970s in prominent exhibition catalogues, artists' monographs, and art journals. In 2004 a selection of his photographs was featured in the exhibition Side by Side at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York.