Diane Arbus
The King and Queen of a Senior Citizens Dance, N.Y.C.

Image Not Available for The King and Queen of a Senior Citizens Dance, N.Y.C.

© Estate of Diane Arbus

The King and Queen of a Senior Citizens Dance, N.Y.C.
Image Not Available for The King and Queen of a Senior Citizens Dance, N.Y.C.
ArtistAmerican, 1923–1971
PrinterAmerican, born England, 1947
CultureAmerican
Titles
  • The King and Queen of a Senior Citizens Dance, N.Y.C.
  • Their numbers were picked out of a hat. They were just chosen King and Queen of a senior citizens dance in N.Y.C. Yetta Granat is 72 and Charles Fahrer is 79. They have never met before.
  • from the portfolio A box of ten photographs
Date1970, printed 1973
MediumGelatin silver print
DimensionsImage: 14 5/8 × 14 11/16 in. (37.2 × 37.3 cm)
Sheet: 19 7/8 × 16 in. (50.5 × 40.6 cm)
Credit LineThe Gay Block Collection, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund and gift of Gay Block
Object number2018.581
Not on view

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Department
Photography
Object Type
Description


Diane Arbus’s honest and intimate photographs of people on the margins of society reveal what was extraordinary in the familiar and what was familiar in the extraordinary. Her portraits—straightforward in their technique, highly personal in their choice of subject, and collaborative in their approach— proved to be immediately and profoundly influential on subsequent photography. Already by November 1972, when a posthumous retrospective of Arbus’s work opened at the Museum of Modern Art, Robert Hughes declared in Time that her work “has had such an influence on other photographers that it is hard to remember how original it was.” The portfolio “a box of ten photographs,” conceived and assembled in 1969–71, is Arbus’s first and only distillation of her mature work, containing some of her most iconic images made between 1962 and 1970.



ProvenanceEstate of the artist; [consigned to Witkin Gallery, New York]; [purchased by Harry Lunn, 1972]; [purchased by Jo Tartt, Washington, D.C., late 1970s]; purchased by Gay Block, Houston, 1986; purchased by MFAH, 2018.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
Stamped in black ink, verso, top left: Not to be reproduced in any way without // written permission from Doon Arbus.
Stamped in black ink, verso, top center: This print is part of a limited edition portfolio of // ten Diane Arbus photographs. 8/50 [edition number inscribed in blue ink]
Printed and inscribed on applied label, verso, top right: A diane arbus photograph // title The King and Queen of a Senior Citizens Dance, N.Y.C. // date 1970 // print by Neil Selkirk, 1973 // Doon Arbus [signed]
Inscribed in pencil, verso, sideways on bottom right corner: 7 [circled] // 19 sec // 2k [?]

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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Diane Arbus
1967, printed later
Gelatin silver print
2005.1869