Diane Arbus
A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C.

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© Estate of Diane Arbus

A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C.
Image Not Available for A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C.
ArtistAmerican, 1923–1971
CultureAmerican
Titles
  • A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C.
  • from the portfolio A box of ten photographs
Date1966, printed 1973
Place depictedNew York City, New York, United States
MediumGelatin silver print
DimensionsSheet: 19 7/8 × 16 in. (50.5 × 40.6 cm)
Credit LineThe Gay Block Collection, gift of Gay Block
Object number2014.1107
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; given to MFAH, 2014.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
Signed in blue ink on verso: diane Arbus photograph
Two printed label on verso with additional marks in ink:

This print is part of a limited edition portfolio / ten Diane Arbus photographs 8/50

(signature) / title a young man in curlers at home at West 20th Stret / date N.Y.C. c.1966 / print by Neil Selkirk, 1973 / Doon Arbus

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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