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Still Life, Street Life
Jean Dykstra
04/01/2004
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During his lifetime, Edward Weston (1886-1958) never received much more than $35
for one of his photographs, apart from the commercial work he did. Diane Arbus
sold her photographs for $60 to $70 at the height of her career.
 | | MEMPHIS BY William Eggleston. |
How times
have changed. Two Shells, 1927, one of Weston’s most beautiful minimalist still
lifes, sold for $467,200 at Sotheby’s New York in October, setting a record for
the artist at auction. “It had all the trappings of a major masterpiece,” says
New York photography dealer Howard Greenberg, who advised his client to buy the
piece.
Arbus’s rare-to-market Box of 10, a box of 10 of her most famous
images, including A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y.,
1970, and Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967, brought $405,500 in October at
New York’s Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg, setting a record for Arbus at
auction. The pre-auction estimate was a mere $90,000 to $120,000. Though Arbus’s
career was relatively short—she committed suicide in 1971 at the age of 48—her
influence has been widespread. The year after she died, the Museum of Modern
Art’s John Szarkowski organized a retrospective of her work. Just four years
earlier she was first shown at MoMA, along with Lee Friedlander and Garry
Winogrand, in the influential New Documents exhibition. Despite the fact (or, as
some have argued, because of the fact) that Arbus’s estate has been notoriously
restrictive about the publication and exhibition of her work, her star has
steadily risen in the marketplace—and is likely to continue on course. She is
the subject of a major traveling retrospective, with which her estate has
cooperated, that originated at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and is on
view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through May 30.
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