Vivienne in the green dress, NYC
Artist
Nan Goldin
American, born 1953
Date1980
MediumCibachrome print
DimensionsImage: 38 3/4 × 26 in. (98.4 × 66 cm)
Frame: 41 × 28 1/2 in. (104.1 × 72.4 cm)
Frame: 41 × 28 1/2 in. (104.1 × 72.4 cm)
ClassificationsPhotography
Credit LineGift of Dr. W. Kent Davis and Dr. Carlos Garcia-Velez in honor of Tim Hovis Gobern
Object number2008.16
On View
Not on viewNan Goldin’s title seems as straightforward as the photograph we see: a woman stands in front of us wearing a green dress. Like Vermeer’s The Kitchen Maid (1658–1660), Goldin’s portrait documents a woman standing next to a window. But unlike Vermeer’s anonymous figure, the young woman here is not just anyone; she is Vivienne. She looks out resolutely at Goldin, and by transference, us.
Goldin’s identity as a photographer, which began when she moved from Boston to the gritty Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 1970s, is closely associated with the company she keeps. Her thirty-year oeuvre acts as a family album of sorts: tender, snapshotlike photographs of her romantic partners, her friends, and their social and creative environments. Just as Vermeer helped create an art-historical revolution by giving the daily activities of working-class citizens of seventeenth-century Holland his artistic attention, Goldin says she “desires to preserve the sense of people’s lives, to endow them with the strength and beauty” she sees in them.
[J. Dasal, 2010]ProvenanceCreated New York, 1980; collection of the artist; [Matthew Marks Gallery, New York]; Carlos Garcia-Velez, Raleigh, NC, 2007; given to NCMA, 2008.
Published ReferencesNan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (New York: Aperture Press, 1986), illus. (color) 21.
Elizabeth Sussman, Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, and Zürich: Scala Verlag AG, 1996), illus. (color) 134.
Linda J. Dougherty, entry for Vivienne in the green dress, NYC, in North Carolina Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections, rev. ed. (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2010), 576, illus. (color) 577.
Exhibition HistoryRaleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, “Outsiders: Facing the Camera,” July 21, 2013–January 26, 2014.
Raleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, "The People's Collection, Reimagined," June 5, 2023-November 28, 2023. Object Rights Statement
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