Soon after moving to Mabou, Frank and Leaf strung a clothesline outside their house. The line soon appeared in Frank’s works—not in its mundane role for drying laundry, but as a literal and figurative support for more artistic ideas. With it, Frank brought the essence of his artwork into the setting of his daily life. By replacing shirts and bedsheets with images, he brought outdoors a practice usually associated with studio and darkroom processes—the pinning of drying prints or film strips on a line, where they can be contemplated or compared with one another.
Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, Sep 15, 2024–Jan 11, 2025
Research in progress; information about this work may be incomplete.
Explore more
Robert Frank
American, born Switzerland.1924–2019 294 works onlineRobert Frank’s restless, gritty, melancholic vision marked him as an astute documentarian of the postwar American landscape. Born into a German-Jewish family in Zurich in 1924, he developed an interest in photography at an early age and apprenticed with several photographers in his teens.
Learn more →
From MoMA Design Store
Licensing
Artwork or archival images
If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA's collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).
Audio and film clips
MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit Circulating Film and Video Library.
Text from a publication or the archives
If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA's archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].
Feedback
This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please fill out this feedback form.