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Dimensions: measurements note 15 1/4 by 14 3/4 in. (38.7 by 37.5 cm.)
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Provenance: Acquired by the present owner from the Diane Arbus Estate, 1974
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Literature: Other prints of this image:Diane Arbus (Aperture, 1972, in conjunction with the exhibition originating at The Museum of Modern Art, New York), unpaginatedDiane Arbus: Revelations (New York, 2003, in conjunction with the exhibition originating at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), p. 46John Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960 (The Museum of Modern Art, 1978, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 100Sarah Greenough, Joel Snyder, David Travis, and Colin Westerbeck, On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., and The Art Institute of Chicago, 1989, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 360Emma Dexter and Thomas Weski, eds., Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph (Tate Modern, 2003, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 237Photographien im Dialog (Köln, 1997, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 57Peter Weiermair and Gerald Matt, Americans: The Social Landscape from 1940 until 2006, Masterpieces of American Photography (Kunstalle Wien, 2006, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 95Eye of the Beholder: Photographs from the Collection of Richard Avedon (San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 2006, in conjunction with the exhibition), vol. 1, unpaginated
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Notes: Writer Bill Hayes was thirteen in 1974 when he first saw Diane Arbus's photographs in a copy of her monograph at a Spokane, Washington, bookstore. Several times each month, he would take a bus downtown to spend time looking through the volume. Rediscovering the photographs during Arbus's retrospective exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2003, he eloquently describes his reencounter with A Young Man in Curlers at Home on West 20υth Street, 'Seeing another photo in the show, "A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street," I remembered how unsettling this particular image was to the unsettled me of thirteen. With his long lacquered fingernails, plucked eyebrows, and pockmarked skin that no amount of makeup could smooth over, this homely girly-man seemed like a nightmare vision of what could become of an effeminate boy. In a staring contest between us, I would always blink first and have to turn the page. Facing him again at the museum, however, where his portrait was the first displayed in the show, I saw a brave, regal creature. I nodded my respect and moved on' (The Threepenny Review, No. 97, Spring 2004).
