Photographer Lisette Model once told her students at the New School, "Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." How true—painting and drawing demand specialized training, but everyone takes snapshots, so the Vienna-born Model (1901–1983) instilled in her pupils a search for beauty beyond the surfeit of information that even banal photographs deliver. Her 1937 shot of a man sleeping on a Paris bench transforms his body into an enervated diagonal against the stone. A decade later, after moving to New York, Model framed a woman's leg striding down Fifth Avenue, black wedge of high heel echoed by a chevron of light below the knee, a burst of abstraction alive with postwar dynamism. Works from more than a dozen of the artists Model instructed have been brought together in this huge show, which includes Diane Arbus's "backwards man" in his ratty hotel room, face turned in one direction, feet in the other, under a naked lightbulb casting grim, Francis Bacon–like shadows. A 1991 image by Bruce Cratsley features a poster that has been run over in an East Village street, tire marks crenellating the printed face like the cracks in an old master; his image of an AIDS patient clutching stuffed animals is lit with the pathos of a Caravaggio. The misty illumination of public baths and steam rooms imbues Ruth Kaplan's recent nudes with the monumentality of marble sculptures—a direct line back to the visceral vitality that Model discovered over and over again in her... More >>>