Oral history interview with Camille Feinberg

Scope and Contents

An interview of Camille Feinberg conducted 2000 June 27, by Paul Karlstrom, for the Archives of American Art, in the offices of the Archives of American Art, San Marino, Calif.

Scope and Contents

Another in the artists and models series, this interview with artist and performer in New York City for 18 years, Camille Feinberg focused on her activity in the late 1960s when she posed for a number of Los Angeles artists. She began her "career" when a student at Pasadena City College and then worked at the Pasadena Museum of Art and various private studios over a period of several years. Highlights of the interview include accounts of private sessions with Richard Diebenkorn, John Altoon, Richard Feynman, and Jirayr Zorthian. She also candidly discussed the generally unacknowledged erotic aspect of posing. Feinberg believes that the resultant tension creates an energy that contributes to the process of art making. For her, the studio was a place where people can safely act out personal fantasies. She described the range of studio behavior among artists: Diebenkorn was entirely respectful and professional while some of the others, notably Altoon, were less so. Above all, she remembers the experience as "relating to another human being."

Biographical / Historical

Camille Feingberg is an artist and performer of New York, N.Y.