72 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
Lange’s “Woman of the High Plains, Texas Panhandle,” from 1938.
THEA RT WORLD
OUT OF THE DARK
Dorothea Lange and Félix Fénéon at MOMA.By Peter Schjeldahl1886, the term “Neo-Impressionism,”
and for his championing of Georges
Seurat, he is characterized in the show’s
catalogue as “implacable, inscrutable,
meticulous, and mysterious.” Lanky and
sporting an Uncle Sam-like goatee
(Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec portrayed
him in profile at the Moulin Rouge, ac-
companied by a rotund Oscar Wilde),
Fénéon merits nothing so much as the
latter-day American honorific “cool.”
There’s a mystery about Lange, too,
which owes to her evasiveness about
being called an artist, rather than a doc-
umentary photographer. In fact, she was
a supreme artist, whose pictures lodged
the Depression in the world’s imagina-tion and memory at least as much John
Steinbeck’s writing did: with truths to
life on a scale of everlasting myth.
Lange was born in Hoboken, New
Jersey, in 1895, and went to school on
New York’s Lower East Side, a rare Gen-
tile among thousands of Jewish school-
mates at P.S. 62, on Hester Street. Her
father abandoned the family when she
was twelve. A childhood bout of polio
left her with a lifelong limp, which, she
said, “formed me, guided me, instructed
me, helped me, and humiliated me.” De-
termined to become a photographer even
before she first used a camera, she as-
sisted at studios throughout the city and
studied the medium at Columbia Uni-
versity. In 1918, would-be world travels
with a friend stalled in San Francisco,
after the two women were robbed. There
Lange found patrons for a studio of her
own and became a successful portrait-
ist of the city’s élite. (She also married
a painter, Maynard Dixon, and had two
children.) Her grounding in portraiture
seems key to her subsequent singular-
ity. With the onset of the Depression,
she took to the streets. Her photograph
“White Angel Bread Line, San Fran-
cisco” (1933), of a dejected man turned
aside from a mass of others, became a
public sensation. Between 1935 and 1939,
she drove the back roads of the West
and the South as part of a program that
promoted the New Deal by distribut-
ing the resulting material to newspapers
and magazines.
Lange stood out from the start. Her
sensitivity to faces individualizes each of
her subjects. The encounter is an event
in that subject’s life—and in Lange’s own.
Her images defy generalization. Facts of
poverty and exhaustion speak for them-
selves. Lange cuts through them to specific
presences, whose thoughts we seem to
know, and which she enhanced with ver-
nacular quotations that she compiled,
with her second husband, the economist
Paul Taylor, in the book “An American
Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion,”
in 1939. The MOMA show has a subtitle,
“Words and Pictures”—Lange insisted
that photographs complete their mean-
ing in tandem with verbal information.
That amounts to heresy for a modernist,
which Lange intuitively was in formal
discipline, with her masterly composi-
tions and eloquent gradations of light.
Yet she shrugged off the aesthetic appeal DOROTHEA LANGE / COURTESY MOMAT
wo terrific shows that languish in
darkened galleries at the Museum
of Modern Art should not pass uncel-
ebrated—or unvisited, to the extent that
moma’s Web site ameliorates the lock-
down. It helps that both shows feature
a good deal of verbal content and may
well incite Googling of their brilliant
subjects: Dorothea Lange, the premier
photographer of the human drama of
the Great Depression, and Félix Fénéon,
a shadowy French aesthete and politi-
cal anarchist. Fénéon was also a some-
time art critic, dealer, collector, and jour-
nal editor, and a legendarily sardonic
wit—not an artist but an art-world spark-
plug. Best known for having coined, in