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[Art reviews]

Beautiful dreamers
The photographs of Horst and Hoyningen-Huene

BY CHARLES TAYLOR

" The Look: Images of Glamour and Style, Photographs by Horst and Hoyningen-Huene "
At the Museum of Fine Arts through January 6.

Here’s a tip on how not to view " The Look: Images of Glamour and Style, Photographs by Horst and Hoynigen-Huene, " the gorgeous new show at the MFA. Midway through the exhibit, I came upon a Horst photo of a woman’s torso in a clinging black sheath dress. The meaning of the photo is in the curve of the body, the way the garment accentuates those contours, contrasting the black foreground shape with the artfully lit gray-white background. A woman in the gallery happened to be looking at the same photo of the slim but not at all emaciated model, and she said to her companion, " Well, I guess anorexia was a problem then, too. "

I mention this episode to emphasize that in order to see " The Look " you have to realize that the bulk of photos in this large-scale show were taken in a world that was blessed not to have to deal with the politicization of beauty. This is not a show about body image, not a show that subscribes to the victimization notion that glamor exists to make us feel bad about ourselves. It is, instead, a celebration as quietly composed as a perfectly chilled martini raised in a toast and then savored for its crisp dryness. There is no apology for beauty in the work of Horst P. Horst or George Hoyningen-Huene ( " HOY-ning-en-HUGH-na " ), either on the part of the models for being so stunning or on the part of the photographers for being enraptured by beauty. There are, of course, photographers still working to serve what might be called an ethics of beauty, expressing the belief that beauty and style are not oppressive but elating. Some of them — the likes of Irving Penn, Richard Avedon (whose " serious " photography has never equaled his fashion work), Bruce Weber, and Herb Ritts — are represented here in a gallery highlighting photographers who have built on the vision of Horst and Hoyningen-Huene. But " The Look " makes an excellent case that these two photographers are the fathers of what followed.

If you’re used to looking at fashion photography in glossy magazines or in coffee-table books, it may seem odd to view these photos in the quiet solitude of a museum. (And it may seem heretical to the members of the Boston art community who threw a hissy fit about the MFA’s Herb Ritts exhibit back in 1996.) It makes sense though, to see these portraits at the MFA. Although Horst and Hoyningen-Huene revel in an age where high style was " natural, " a way of life, their work (particularly Hoyningen-Huene’s) retains the meticulous composition of 19th-century portrait painting. And though they’re starker, more casual, Horst’s famous portrait of a reclining Coco Chanel and Hoyningen-Huene’s studies of evening wear wouldn’t look out of place next to Sargent canvasses. The formalization of the work on display here can throw the you if you compare it with the Hollywood glamor photography of the same era, the creamier, dreamier photos done by George Hurrell and Clarence Bull. Or if the work set it next to today’s location fashion photography, with its emphasis on the personalities of the models rather than the clothes.

Not that there aren’t memorable personalities visible in " The Look. " Horst, in particular, made models his collaborators. There are some images from his work with the great model Lisa Fonssagrives (later to marry Irving Penn), whose special talent was to exert her personality through sublimation, using the upswept curve of her neck or the arches of her eyebrows to turn herself into a being as stylized as the clothes she was modeling.

And perhaps my favorite image in the whole show is a 1938 photo of the model Lud, whom Horst discovered working as a messenger. In the photo she stands regally between two columns, one hand leaning against a column, the other arm drawn across her body with its hand resting on her shoulder. Dressed in a white gown that hugs her arms, gathers at the waist, and falls to the floor in a soft, shapely drape, Lud meets the camera’s gaze with a confidence that is both cool and humid, almost daring Horst to capture the full measure of her personality as well as her beauty. The image both reinforces the aristocracy of beauty and proves that it is open to anyone: there are princesses, movie stars, heiresses here who couldn’t hold a candle to this messenger-turned-model. Beauty at its strongest defies convention and becomes the expression of personality, as in Horst’s 1939 portrait of the great Ethel Waters, her head thrown back and her eyes looking to Heaven in supplicating rapture.

The German-born Horst and the Russian-born Hoyningen-Huene did their most characteristic work in the ’30s for the likes of Vogue (American, British, and French editions) and Vanity Fair. The pair were lovers for a time and remained friends after. If a consistent technical theme runs through their work, it is the achievement of richness through limited means. The bulk of the photos here are shot in black and white, without light meters and the other photographic innovations that would follow. The careful planning of each photo’s overall effect, from the layering of black, white, and gray tones and half-tones to the interplay of light and shadow, and the question of how to achieve this effect are probably what give their work its particularly formal, almost still quality. (One of the problems Horst ran into in later years — he died in 1999 — was that contemporary models, working in the " action " photography mode, were not trained to hold a pose.) And the gelatin silver prints have a " fog of time " feel that can’t be recaptured with more precise contemporary techniques.

The luxury of this work is also what makes it deceptive, disguising both the limited technical means Horst and Hoyningen-Huene were working with and the fact that the variations of light and tone were achieved within a limited photographic palette. Look at Hoyningen-Huene’s 1932 portrait of the model-turned-photographer Lee Miller. She’s reclining on a beach chair in a nubby white top, and her large dreamy eyes look off to the right of the frame, one hand behind her head, the other drawn across her waist, her short blond hair combed back in a boyish cut. It’s impossible to tell whether the stripes behind her are shadows or a cabana canopy; edges of dark shadow peek in around the sides of the frame. It’s the simplest, most casual pose imaginable, and the set-up isn’t complicated either. But the overall effect is one of a rich interplay of pattern and texture and light. Even simpler is Hoyningen-Huene’s most famous photograph, which shows a man and woman in Izod swimwear seated and facing out to the ocean, where the water meets the horizon. Except that it was shot on a rooftop in Paris, with the parapet of the building used, trompe-l’oeil style, to pass for the ocean. Even the plain meeting of concrete and sky is given a nuanced contrast.

The show is evenly balanced between fashion work, in which the shape of a hat or gloves or a dress is emphasized rather than the models, and portrait photography. The latter is, to an extent, dependent on the subject. No amount of style can triumph over the likes of Deanna Durbin, Helen Hayes, or the pinched fear that lurks in the eyes of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. There is a casualness to the later shots of writers and artists and actors in both photographers’ work, an attempt to extend their control beyond the studio. And Horst melds his style of studio fashion shots with the new location shooting in his exquisite photos of Veruschka, one of the few models with the expressiveness and feline refinement to match his earlier subjects.

Hoyningen-Huene, who died in 1968, did not live to see the style he pioneered come back into vogue, the style that Horst uses in later photos with varying degrees of success (most spectacularly in a 1988 shot of Debbie Harry, where she is the essence of ’40s glamor). It’s not that in some cases his new celebrity subjects were competing with forerunners who, to borrow a phrase from Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, " had faces then. " It’s that there is a sadness that hangs over these shots, many of them taken in Paris during the ’30s, of a world that is about to vanish forever. Horst’s most famous shot, taken in 1939 after midnight on the day he fled Paris, tells the whole story. Ostensibly a study of a Mainbocher corset, the shot shows a model with her back to the camera, her face barely visible in profile, the loose laces of the corset spilling behind her. It’s an image of undressing, of shedding an elegance that was, with the Occupation, about to seem irrelevant. And yet the fragility of the photo makes it seem more relevant than ever, a link to a civilization of pleasure and humanity that were about to be swept away.

Charles Taylor is a contributing writer to Salon.com.

Issue Date: November 8-15, 2001

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