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 37 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, 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.
Lazarus’s journal entry for May 19, 1960 relates his impressions of Marcel Duchamp, whom he photographed often:
Visited Marcel Duchamp to show him the pictures. I was pleased that he liked them, so I gave him a whole set, which I think he appreciated. [Duchamp’s hands] are never still, but they are seemingly never in motion. They glide from one arm to the other; they are suddenly clasped together. In a moment he is leaning his face on an outstretched finger. A finger to his lips. A hand on an elbow. I sat there and watched a choreography which almost hypnotized me. One would think this endless motion would be distracting, but to the contrary: One feels a fantastic feeling of calm and repose. It is the face; the calm backdrop of his face which coordinates all these motions into the man.
Lazarus’s prints are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Marvin Lazarus : Portraits of Artists 1950s-1960s
On view through Saturday, March 14, 2026
Deborah Bell Photographs
526 W 26th St. Room 411
New York, NY 10001
www.deborahbellphotographs.com
