The Leibovitz Twins

In Philadelphia the only commercial gallery which tries to sell top-notch art is Carlen's, run by a crusading Indianan, Robert Carlen. Last week Carlen's opened a show of 50 works which, to a visitor not in on the secret, might have looked like the one-man show of a promising, well-trained youth, at home in a lot of media: oil, water color, gouache, lithography, etching, drawing. Actually, Carlen's exhibit was the work of two artists. They were identical twins: small, redheaded Freda & Ida Leibovitz, 22.

Harry Leibovitz went to Philadelphia from Russia in 1904, studied sculpture while working for Baldwin Locomotive Works. But when he married "Mama" Leibovitz, he gave up art, started a shoeshop in a residential section which gradually became a crowded Negro slum. By the time the twins, next to last of the ten Leibovitz children, began drawing and coloring, the family lived in bitter poverty. Morris Kellerman, president of American Lending Libraries (drugstore chain), discovered them, enabled the family to find a decent home. Samuel Fleisher, public-spirited Philadelphian, crusader for "Cultural Olympics" (TIME, Dec. 7, 1936), got the twins in the Graphic Sketch Club which he supported. At 14 Freda & Ida were girl wonders who insisted on sitting side by side in class, sometimes could not tell their own sketchbooks apart.

In high school, the Leibovitz twins made one of their rare joint pictures, a mural on which right-handed Freda worked leftward, southpaw Ida in the opposite direction until they met in the centre. The whole thing looked like one artist's work. When the Leibovitz twins, tramping through Philadelphia streets, painted the same subject, their conceptions were almost identical. In the contests in which

Freda & Ida won dozens of prizes, judges were often confused: Eberhard Faber (pencils) put Freda first ($50), Ida second ($25), while the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts reversed the order. Finally the twins thought perhaps they had better get away from each other's influence. Freda went to the Academy; Ida stayed at Moore Institute. It didn't work. When the twins graduated separately, they still painted alike.

Like most identical twins, Freda & Ida talk as one person, in a continuous flow of words. Sample: "(Ida) People have always tried to separate us, but we prefer to be together. (Freda) We seem to be sympathetic types; there is something we get from one another. (Ida) Besides it really increases our production, people think we are bears for work because we do two pictures while someone else does one. (Freda) We are really very prolific."

About their first twin exhibition at Carlen's Freda was "thrilled," Ida was "thrilled." They had typical duplicate canvases of the same subject, a Negro named George. The difference between them was mainly that Freda painted only the head, called it Negro Head, while Ida painted a half-figure, called it George. Also in the show were a good watercolor portrait of Mama Leibovitz by Freda, oil portraits of Freda & Ida by each other, many a picture done in Mexico last summer--where both girls managed to travel on a one-man scholarship won by Ida.

The pictures showed that the twins had acquired a good technical foundation, needed to develop a personal expression. They may well accomplish that. Shortly before their show opened, they began studying (free) at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pa., directed by Dr. Albert C. ("Argyrol") Barnes, who takes as students none but the best. Said Freda, "We'd never seen a collection like it before. We'd never had the influence of the French Impressionists. It's almost breath-taking." Ida: "Now we're getting a new slant on art. It's invigorating."

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