Lisette Model

Lisette Model (November 10, 1901 in Wien as Elise Amelie Felicie Stern - March 30, 1983 in New York City) was an Austrian-born American photographer

Lisette Model was born Elise Felic Amelie Stern in Vienna, Austria. Her father was an Italian/Austrian doctor of Jewish descent attached to the Austrian Imperial Army and, later, to the International Red Cross; her mother was French and Roman Catholic, and Model was baptised into her mother's faith. Two years after her birth, her parents changed their family name to Seybert. According to interview testimony from her older brother, she was sexually molested by her father, though the full extent of his abuse remains unclear.

She was primarily educated by a series of private tutors, achieving fluency in three languages. At age 19, she began studying music with composer Arnold Schönberg, and was familiar to members of his circle. "If ever in my life I had one teacher and one great influence, it was Schönberg," she said.

Model left Vienna for Paris after her father's death in 1924 to study voice with Polish soprano Marya Freund. It was during this period that she met her future husband, the French-Jewish painter Evsa Model. In 1933 she gave up music and recommitted herself to studying visual art, at first taking up painting as a student of Andre Lhote (whose other students included Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Hoyningen-Huene). She also took up photography, taking basic instruction in darkroom techniques from her younger sister Olga Seybert (herself a life-long professional photographer), though Parisian portrait photographer Rogi Andre was the person Model credited with providing her primary instruction in camera techniques.

Visiting her mother in Nice in 1934 (she and Olga had emigrated from Vienna several years prior), Model took her camera out on the Promenade des Anglais and made a series of portraits which are among her most widely reproduced and exhibited images. These close-cropped, often clandestine portraits of the local privileged class already bore what would become her signature style: close-up, unsentimental and unretouched expositions of vanity, insecurity and loneliness.

She married Evsa Model in 1937 and the following year they emigrated to join her husband's sister in Manhattan. There she supported herself as a photographer, having work published regularly in Harper's Bazaar by editors Carmel Snow and Alexey Brodovitch. Model eventually became a member of the New York 'Photo League,' which would host her first dedicated showing.

In 1951, Model was invited to teach at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where her longtime friend Berenice Abbott was also teaching photography. Model's best known pupil was Diane Arbus, who studied under her in 1957, and Arbus owed much of her early technique to Model's example. Model continued to teach until her death in 1983.

Public collections of her work are held at the following institutions:

*Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City
*Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
*The Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego

ource

"Lisette Model" by Ann Thomas, published by the National Gallery of Canada to accompany an exhibition of Model's work which travelled the United States, Canada, and Germany during l990-1992.