Diane Arbus’s Estate Gives Archives to Museum

The estate of the photographer Diane Arbus has given her complete archives — including the often-disturbing portraits of carnival performers, twins, and dwarfs that earned her a cult following — to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, according to The New York Times.

The gift, whose value experts declined to assess, includes hundreds of photographs, along with negatives and contact prints of 7,500 rolls of film, and hundreds of glassine print sleeves that she annotated. Ms. Arbus committed suicide in 1971, at age 48.

The museum has also purchased 20 of Arbus’s most important photographs, including “Russian Midget Friends in a Living Room on 100th Street, N.Y.C.” from 1963, from the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Experts placed the value of these works at at least $5-million.

The gift and the purchase follow the museum’s popular retrospective of the artist’s work two years ago. Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator in the Metropolitan Museum’s department of photographs, predicted that scholars will benefit from the archive. “Generally this kind of material doesn’t survive the artist,” he said.

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