Younger photography fans will maybe connect the name Horst P. Horst (1906-1999) to one of the inspirations for Madonna's 1990s 'Vogue' video. As a tribute to him, the pop star recreated at the time the photographer's 1939 iconic image of a model in a lace-up corset designed by Mainbocher (unfortunately, she didn't think about paying him, which obviously enraged Horst, but that's another story...).
Young Horst fans eager to discover more about him will be happy to hear the Victoria & Albert Museum will be staging the biggest ever UK retrospective of Horst's photography in September - "Horst: Photographer of Style".
Born Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann in Germany in 1906, Horst was the son of a middle-class businessman.
From an early age he displayed an artistic bent and studied crafts at Hamburg Kunstgewerbeschule. At the time he knew Le Corbusier only by reputation, but he wrote the architect a letter asking for a job in his Paris atelier. Surprisingly, Le Corbusier accepted and Horst worked for a few months in 1930 as the architect's apprentice.
He left his job when he was introduced in a café to Baron George Hoyningen-Huene, a photographer for Vogue, becoming his assistant and modelling for him. In 1931 he was given the chance to take pictures for Paris Vogue, and the following year he moved to New York to work for the American edition of the magazine. He became known simply as Horst in 1943 when, as a soldier in the US Army, he had the opportunity to become a US citizen with any name he chose.
In the 1960s Horst started taking pictures illustrating the lifestyle of international high society and, in the following decades, he worked for House & Garden magazine as well as for Vogue.
Many of the models appearing in the pages of Vogue when Horst first started working for the magazine in New York were at the time society friends of Condé Nast, the publisher, and technical limitations - from emulsions to incandescent lights - heavily influenced the posing.
Horst brought some innovations: he experimented with chiaroscuro, added props (he was enamoured of elaborate sets that took days to build, but also loved geometrical abstractions) and borrowed a lot of inspirations from contemporary design.
Influenced by Edward Steichen's modernism and Huene's classicism and purity (with a nod to Surrealism, more visible in his photomontages), he added electrical lighting and bright pools of light, at times producing haloes that made his models look like angels, at others creating disembodied, mysterious and fantastic images.
Horst was obsessed with fantasy and elegance: his camera had to create illusions, and add a glamorous edge where there wasn't one. Horst's sculpturesque three-dimensional technique is the main reason why his models looked at times like beautiful marble statues, while statues looked as if they were alive.
Quite often in interviews Horst stated that. when he started working for Vogue, he knew nothing about fashion and learnt as he went along, using his minor architectural training as a rough guide to create his own sense of elegance.
Visitors to the V&A exhibition will be able to explore Horst's extensive career, spanning 60 years, through more than 250 iconic black and white and colour images, plus diaries, contact sheets, sketches, film footage, magazines, and Haute Couture pieces by couturiers who became Horst's friends, including Elsa Schiaparelli.
The images on display relate not only to fashion, but also to other fields and will include pictures of Salvador Dali's costumes for Leonid Massine's ballet "Bacchanale", portraits of film stars such as Marlene Dietrich, nudes and pictures from Horst's travels.
Visitors interested in graphic design will also be able to admire Horst's "Patterns from Nature" series, photomontages of pictures of flowers and shells. A final tip: when visiting, try to look at the images with an architectural eye - it will help you discovering this artist, too often considered just a fashion photographer, from a very different point of view.
"Horst: Photographer of Style", Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK, from 6th September 2014 to 4th January 2015.
Image credits for this post:
All images courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum.
1. Corset by Detolle for Mainbocher, 1939. Copyright Condé Nast/Horst Estate.
2. Horst directing a fashion shoot with Lisa Fonssagrives, 1949. Photo by Roy Stevens Time Life Pictures, Getty Images.
3. Summer Fashions, American Vogue cover, 15 May 1941. Copyright Condé Nast/Horst Estate.
4. Dress by Hattie Carnegie, 1939. Copyright Condé Nast/Horst Estate.
5. Muriel Maxwell, American Vogue cover, 1 July 1939. Copyright Condé Nast/Horst Estate.
6. Salvador Dalí's costumes for Leonid Massine's ballet "Bacchanale", 1939. Copyright Condé Nast/Horst Estate.
7. Dinner suit and headdress by Schiaparelli, 1947. Copyright Condé Nast/Horst Estate.
8. Marlene Dietrich, New York, 1942. Copyright Condé Nast/Horst Estate.
9. View of ruins at the palace of Persepolis, Persia, 1949.Copyright Condé Nast/Horst Estate.
10. Patterns from Nature, Photographic Collage, c. 1945. Copyright Condé Nast/Horst Estate.
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments