Running Legs, Fifth Avenue

Born in Vienna, Model was a student of Arnold Schoenberg’s, the avant-garde pianist, composer, and music theorist, from 1920 to 1921. After the death of her father, she moved to France and began seven years of singing lessons in Paris, but she ultimately quit music and in 1933 began studying visual art instead: first painting with André Lhote; then photography with her sister, Olga, and with Rogi André and her husband, André Kertész. Model’s first photographs—graphically bold studies of aging tourists on the French Riviera—were published in 1935 in the French periodical Regards. Four years later, after marrying Evsa Model, a Russian designer and painter, she moved with him to New York to escape Hitler and the collapse of Europe. Once in America, Model immediately embarked on two innovative series of photographs inspired by the energy of the city: Reflections, a study of shop windows, and Running Legs. In this work from the latter series, the unusual, ankle-high perspective and stylistic blurring evokes the hurried pace of the metropolis at rush hour. With just a hint of street glamour and surprisingly little other pictorial content, the photograph effectively recalls the experiments with harmony and dissonance in the artist’s early musical training in Austria.