Masterpieces & Curiosities: Diane Arbus’s Jewish Giant

Eddie Carmel was the son of immigrants from Tel Aviv. He had lived a normal life in mid-century New York until age fifteen, when he began to suffer from acromegaly, a hormonal condition causing extreme growth. He soon needed custom-made clothing, and was unable to finish college or pursue a typical career because he realized that people could not look beyond his physical appearance. Feeling like a social outcast, he embraced a life in show business, celebrating and even exaggerating the feature that made him unique. This iconic portrait shows an ailing Eddie, age 34, struggling to stand upright just two years before his death.

Arbus’s photographs often explore the tension between normalcy and aberrance. Here, she touches on our obsession with superhuman height—a recurrent theme in folklore and popular culture, from Goliath and the Golem to Andre the Giant and the Incredible Hulk. Her image and its mesmerizing subject may thus be seen in both historical and metaphorical terms.

Artists and audiences have long marveled at any deviation from a supposed standard, but the allure of the extraordinary is deeply intertwined with unease about the human body, its unpredictable abnormalities, and their attendant difficulties. In this way, gigantism and its mythology offer lessons about the infinite range of human experience, poignantly emphasized by Arbus’s photograph.

Masterpieces & Curiosities: Diane Arbus’s Jewish Giant is organized by Daniel S. Palmer, Leon Levy Assistant Curator. The series is organized by Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Public Programs, and Daniel S. Palmer.

About Masterpieces & Curiosities

Masterpieces & Curiosities is a series of intimate “essay” exhibitions organized around single works from the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum. Each exhibition examines and rethinks the piece on view by surrounding it with other artworks, objects, documents, and source materials. Unlike traditional museum exhibitions, it does not offer a master narrative to reinforce an artistic canon or explain knowledge and experience, but rather explores the stories that inform the individual artwork or cultural object.

Some of the works in focus are masterpieces—recognized artworks of unmatched value, great significance, beauty, and craftsmanship. Others are oddities—unexpected and eccentric creations that merit closer attention. Even the most apparently traditional or peculiar work of art reveals complex histories and rich layers of meaning when it is seen freshly, through a contemporary lens and in the larger context of cultural and social history.

The Jewish Museum’s permanent collection is vast and heterogeneous. Masterpieces & Curiosities aims to invigorate our study and display of these objects in innovative ways, thus celebrating their diversity and discovering some of the collection’s many hidden treasures.

Jens Hoffmann
Deputy Director
Exhibitions and Public Programs