Diane Arbus - Photographs New York Tuesday, April 4, 2023 | Phillips
  • “Arbus’s photographs are superb accomplishments reflecting total control of the medium. Her concentrated work spanned a relatively short time, only 10 years, but she seems to have sensed the primary hallmarks of her work from the beginning. The intense, calculated frontality of her subjects affects us immediately.”
    —Peter C. Bunnell, 1973

    The remarkable selection of photographs offered in this auction as lots 203 through 240 comes from the collection of Peter C. Bunnell (1937-2021), the pioneering curator, teacher, and photographic historian. All of the sale’s proceeds will be distributed to six institutions with whom Bunnell was associated — Rochester Institute of Technology, Ohio University, Yale University, The George Eastman Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and Princeton University Art Museum — to establish endowments to support the study of photographic history.

     

    Bunnell began his long career in photography as a student of Minor White’s at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the 1950s, and was recruited by White to work on the seminal periodical of artistic photography, Aperture. He joined the staff of The Museum of Modern Art in 1966 as a collection cataloguer, becoming Associate Curator and then Curator of Photography. At MoMA he curated the noteworthy exhibitions Photography as Printmaking (1968), Photography into Sculpture (1970), and the first retrospective of the work of Clarence H. White (1971). In 1972, he was hired as the inaugural David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton University. 

     

    Bunnell served as Director of the Princeton University Art Museum from 1973 to 1978, and as Acting Director from 1998 to 2000, while also being the Museum’s Curator of Photography throughout the entirety of his tenure. Bunnell built a broad-ranging collection of photographs at the Museum, the firsthand examination of which became a central element of the student experience in his classes and seminars. Bunnell also assembled a personal collection of photography over the course of his long career that reflects his vast and deep understanding of the medium. Begun in the 1950s, before photography galleries and dealers were commonplace, Bunnell’s collection is a deeply personal one, put together with a sense of joy and curiosity that includes both icons and lesser-known gems spanning the history of photography.

    • Provenance

      Collection of Peter C. Bunnell, Princeton, New Jersey

    • Literature

      Arbus, Sussman, Phillips, Selkirk and Rosenheim, Diane Arbus: Revelations, p. 73
      Aperture, Diana Arbus: Magazine Work, p. 79 there titled Gerard Malanga

    • Artist Biography

      Diane Arbus

      American • 1923 - 1971

      Transgressing traditional boundaries, Diane Arbus is known for her highly desirable, groundbreaking portraiture taken primarily in the American Northeast during the late 1950s and 1960s. Famous for establishing strong personal relationships with her subjects, Arbus' evocative images capture them in varied levels of intimacy. Whether in their living rooms or on the street, their surreal beauty transcends the common distance found in documentary photography.

      Taken as a whole, Arbus' oeuvre presents the great diversity of American society — nudists, twins, babies, beauty queens and giants — while each distinct image brings the viewer into contact with an exceptional individual brought to light through Arbus' undeniable genius. 

      View More Works

A Reverence for Beauty: The Peter C. Bunnell Collection, Part 2

210

Lot offered with No Reserve

Young man on a sofa, N.Y.C.

1966
Gelatin silver print, printed between 1966 and 1967.
10 1/4 x 10 1/4 in. (26 x 26 cm)
Signed by the artist in pencil, stamped 'A Diane Arbus print,' signed, annotated by Doon Arbus, Executor, in ink, estate copyright credit and reproduction limitation stamps on the reverse of the flush-mount. Accompanied by a letter of authentication from the Estate of Diane Arbus.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$8,000 - 12,000 

Sold for $15,240

Contact Specialist

Sarah Krueger
Head of Department, Photographs
skrueger@phillips.com


Vanessa Hallett
Worldwide Head of Photographs and Chairwoman, Americas
vhallett@phillips.com

Photographs

New York Auction 4 April 2023