Dear Rowley,
To the Victoria & Albert Museum this week for the press vernisage of Horst: Photographer of Style. Horst is one of the titans of 20th century fashion photography: a golden German-born youth who arrived in Paris aged 24 to study with Le Corbusier and became the lover of French Vogue’s principal photographer Baron George Hoyningen-Huene. Within three years his work had appeared in French, American and British Vogue beginning a relationship with Condé Nast that would span six decades.
Cecil Beaton’s 1930 portraits of Horst make it patently obvious why he caused such a sensation in Paris. He had the body of a classical Greek sculpture and the face of a young Montgomery Clift. In the ugly business of beautiful people he appears to have been a charmer befriending the notoriously spiky Coco Chanel and quixotic Elsa Schiaparelli. Like Hoyningen-Huene, Horst’s early fashion photography was of the Grecian Goddess mode; posing favourite models Lyla Zelensky, Helen Bennett and Irving Penn’s future muse/wife Lisa Fonssagrives as statuesque deities.
The fashions of the 1930s – Vionnet’s bias-cut, Lanvin’s drape and Chanel’s severe monotones – naturally lent themselves to the stark, dramatic lighting for which Horst became famous. His studies in perfection also made Horst a valuable commodity in Hollywood where his portraits of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich and Ginger Rogers flattered and mythologised these drama queens. Dietrich in particular had learned about lighting from the master, her Svengali Josef von Sternberg, so her working relationship with Horst was praise indeed.
I have to say the curation of Horst: Photographer of Style by Susanna Brown was incredibly clever. The story of Horst’s evolution as a photographer is told chronologically and supported by fascinating ephemera such as a dazzling carousel of mannequins wearing fine examples of 1930s fashion designed by Molyneux, Schiaparelli and Vionnet. From fashion we move into a room of works inspired by Surrealism and, in particular, Dali. Images shot for the beauty pages of Vogue are reminiscent of Man Ray though Brown doesn’t flinch from showing experimental work that failed to please such as a nightmarish female nude with lobster.
Bravo to Susanna Brown for showing two versions of Horst’s most famous image the Mainbocher Corset (1939) and the Vogue spread the photograph was featured in. On the magazine page the Mainbocher Corset appears lifeless and yet editions sell at Christie’s and Sotheby’s today for $60,000 plus. The exhibition poses the question about our perceptions of art. A commercial commission for an inconsequential magazine spread can, in the hands of Horst, become a masterpiece.
The V&A does excel at bringing static exhibitions to life without turning them into theme parks. There was a lovely short film screening of Horst photographing the great Dorian Leigh for a US Vogue shoot in 1946 styled by Muriel Maxwell. Apart from being slightly distracted by Horst’s god-like assistant Vassilov, I was absolutely fascinated to see the working relationship between Horst and Dorian: mother of all supermodels and a personal favourite. The process seemed to be ‘make perfection, find a pose, hold the pose and freeze’.
Though Horst is remembered for fashion, the exhibition gives equal attention to his experimental work. I have to say his black and white studies of plants and shells left me cold but his portfolios shot in Iran and Syria are epic in their beauty though I’d imagine Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor Diana Vreeland was secretly cursing that Horst hadn’t taken Suzy Parker and a trunk full of couture on his travels.
The gallery that really displays Horst’s moxie as a fashion photographer is dominated by a glass-topped cabinet displaying 90 of his Vogue covers. 25 full colour blow-ups taken from the original negatives line the white walls and show that Horst was a pioneer with colour photography who had an artist’s eye for directing and shooting knockout fashion magazine covers. To this scale and minus the magazine title and cover lines these imagines sing.
I thoroughly approved of the handling of Horst’s glamorous interiors photography for Vreeland’s US Vogue in the 60s. Various spreads were projected onto a white walled room set that gave a vivid impression of interiors designed for Saint Laurent, Lagerfeld, Babe Paley and Gloria Guinness. The male nudes Horst photographed in the 1950s are given their own dimly lit gallery. Unlike a George Platt-Lynes, Horst’s nudes are elegant, abstract still life rather than soft core pornography. I can see the influence on Mapplethorpe but not Herb Ritts or Bruce Weber.
Horst died in 1999 aged 93 having lived to see his 1930s fashion photography come back into fashion and his work hung in galleries in New York and London. He lived with his partner the British diplomat Valentine Lawford from 1947 until Lawford’s death in 1991. An invitation to their weekend retreat in Oyster Bay was much coveted with the guest book signed by 20th century idols Coco Chanel, Greta Garbo, Cecil Beaton, Noël Coward and Christian Dior. To shoot the most creative people of his age was a great achievement for Horst. To make them friends and then to keep them is his compliment.
and whoever lit the galleries