Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1966

Christie’s is pleased to offer a special print with impeccable provenance of one of the most important images of the twentieth century—Diane Arbus’s Identical twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1966. This print was gifted to the influential art director Ruth Ansel by Diane Arbus in 1970. It has been in Ansel’s possession for 55 years, and is being offered to the market now for the first time. Made by Arbus herself, it is signed and dedicated on the front and titled on the back.

During December 1966, Diane Arbus attended a Christmas party of identical twins in Roselle, New Jersey where she made this indelible work of art. As can be seen in the contact sheet illustrated here (and now part of the Diane Arbus Archive at The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Arbus photographed three sets of twin girls on this roll of medium-format film. Six of the sheet’s twelve exposures are of Cathleen and Colleen Wade, and the now celebrated image can be seen upside down, as the second image from the bottom on the left negative strip.

The sisters stand shoulder to shoulder in matching corduroy dresses, white tights, and headbands. As noted on page 182 of Diane Arbus Revelations, Arbus wrote on the December 11 page of her appointment book “GREAT GIRL TWINS. REN EYES,” a reference to her younger sister, Renée. Arbus’s chosen frame stands out both for its startling directness and for the twin subjects’ enigmatic, forever-indecipherable expressions.

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” - Diane Arbus

Born in New York City in 1923, Diane Arbus (born Nemerov) first began taking pictures in the early 1940s, and by the year of her death in 1971 had begun to deeply impact the worlds of art and photography. In 1972, the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, headed by esteemed curator John Szarkowski, mounted a full-scale retrospective of her work, helping to cement her place in a quickly evolving canon of great 20th century artists.

1966 was a significant year for Arbus. That January she applied for her second Guggenheim Fellowship, and by mid-March had learned of her successful application and its accompanying grant of $7500, a consequential affirmation of the importance of her work. That same year she made some of her most celebrated images—not only the image being offered here, Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1966., but also A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C., and A young Brooklyn family going for a Sunday outing, N.Y.C..

Ruth Ansel, whose print we are offering, is one of the leading magazine art directors of the latter half of the 20th century. As an art director of Harper’s Bazaar (from 1961 to 1972) Ansel not only worked with Arbus, but with Bill Brandt, Peter Beard, Helmut Newton, and Richard Avedon, whose numerous memorable covers Ansel designed.

During the 1960s, Arbus often took assignments from, and pitched ideas to, the magazines of the era, Harper’s Bazaar most prominent among them. It was in those offices that Ansel first met Arbus and where the two became friends. At the time, Harper's Bazaar's published a recurring editorial by the name of The Fashion Independent, and Arbus regularly pitched portrait subjects to Ansel for the section, among other projects, over the course of the 1960s.

Four years after making the portrait of Identical twins, Arbus was to choose this image for A box of ten photographs, her only portfolio, which she self-produced in 1970 and 1971, and presented in a Plexiglas box designed by Marvin Israel.

Ansel recalls when Arbus came by the Harper's Bazaar offices to show her a mock-up of the portfolio, Ruth was heartbroken to confess that, at $1000, she couldn't afford one. There was nothing she had seen before that left such a deep impression on her. The photographs were transformative and Ansel couldn't get them out of her mind. It was as though Arbus had taken a leap into the unknown. Then a week or so later Arbus came by the office. As Ansel recalled, “She said, 'I would like to make a gift of this to you.' She knew I loved her twins picture above all the others and with a quiet gesture she handed me this print—signed and dedicated to me.”

“An art director at best is a catalyst for change responding to evolution in all areas of culture. I like to challenge every­one’s comfort zone, especially my own. I like readers to be provoked, disturbed, even outraged.” - Ruth Ansel

The border treatment of the present lot confirms that Arbus made this print between 1967 and 1969. As described by Neil Selkirk (the only person authorized to make posthumous prints of her photographs) in the essay ‘In the Darkroom’, published in Diane Arbus Revelations (2005), “around 1965, [Arbus] had begun to surround her square images with broad, irregular black borders.” Up until that point she had always employed hard edges to her images with ample white borders.

A filed-out negative carrier provided this shift to black borders. Those irregular, black borders eventually gave way to a much-softened, still irregular treatment. “She reduced the black borders to a vestigial condition,” Selkirk writes. “The new borders were scarcely there.” This became her signature style from 1969-1971, informing her later work and used for her famous portfolio, A box of ten photographs.

Large format, lifetime prints of Identical twins, such as the present lot, are extremely scarce. Ones that are signed and titled and that have stayed with the original owner, even more so. Arbus’s work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris, among many other institutions.