The photography of Horst P. Horst: 60 years of elegance and style

Associated media

Roy Clark reports on ‘Horst: Photographer of Style’ at Victoria & Albert Museum, London

This autumn finds the V&A dedicating its major seasonal exhibition to one of the most important photographers of the 20th century, Horst P.Horst

Horst’s reputation was forged as, and remains, that of a fashion photographer par excellence. His influence was profound and lasting and can be seen in the work of many leading practitioners in the genre including Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts,  Bruce Weber and Tim Walker.

For anyone interested in Fashion or 20th-century design this show is clearly a must-see. Nonetheless, if you are not a fashionista or a student of style and so perhaps feel disinclined to visit...don’t be. This is an exhibition for anyone with an interest in the art of photography to enjoy. In fact far from being a figure interested solely in artifice and all things superficial, Horst emerges from the breadth and depth of his interests as a fully formed and original artist whose work like that of all true masters rises far above his chosen genre.

In many ways Horst can be seen as a bellwether of his artistic times, extemporising, and interpreting in commercial photographic form the modes of visual expression to which he was exposed through his interests and also through his friendships with leading artists and designers such Salvador Dali, Jean-Michel Frank and Coco Chanel.

The exhibition uses a range of materials and resources to help create a fully rounded picture of its subject and his world. These include couture garments, fashion and lifestyle magazines, film footage, letters and other ephemera. It also showcases some of his lesser-known non-fashion photography, including celebrity portraits, male nudes, travel photography and a superb series of studies of plants and natural forms.

Wisely, given the exceptional length (60 years) of his career, the exhibition adopts a standard timeline approach as it traces the development of Horst’s style from the exuberant early studio style to a more measured technique of his later work.

In his best work, Horst’s grasp of form, texture and mass and their distribution within the pictorial space is startling effective. It has often been noted that his photographs have an incredibly sculptural quality. Careful control and use of light and shade often give the impression that his models, fully clothed or otherwise, are in fact classical sculpture hewn from marble. A prime example of this and perhaps his best known work is the much acclaimed and reproducedMainbocher Corset.

A master of light he most certainly was, but a master of colour too.  As a newly printed series of colour photographs from the original  transparencies shot for Vogue in the 1940s and ’50s clearly demonstrate.

Horst often combined blocks of strong and frequently contrasting colour within a composition to achieve a modern yet classicizing look. He also reveals a deep understanding of the contemporary trends in fine art, such as Surrealism and semi abstraction, whilst subtly giving pre-eminence of the main subject, the clothes. A prime example of this is Dinner suit and Headdress by Schiaparelli 1947 from the aforementioned Vogue series.

With the arrival of dependable colour film emulsions into the world of commercial photography during the 1940s, Horst seemed to have immediately and apparently effortlessly mastered the new medium. How so? A close examination of the wealth of black and white fashion shots from the 1930s on display offers a clue to this mastery. His knowledge of tonal control, so important when working with monochrome to maximize depth, balance and vibrancy in an image, was a superb grounding for his colour work. Likewise, his supreme talent for controlling lighting effects to accentuate the three-dimensional and dramatic, which worked so well in the earlier era, worked equally well in the new polychrome world.

Even a photographer with a sustained and sparkling 60-year career at the very top of his profession is bound by the nature of the business he was in. Perhaps more than most, Horst was aware of how the wheel of fashion relentlessly moves on and by the 1960s and ’70s, whilst still working his stylish and distinctive austere neo-classical style for lifestyle magazines, his fashion work dwindled as he gave way to a new generation working  with more realist and ‘snapshot’ stylings. It seems doubtful that any of this bothered him very much. He reportedly was not even that interested in fashion, famously saying ‘fashion is an expression of the time, elegance is something else again’.

Another definition of fashion is of course its  cyclical nature, and by the 1980s fashion editors were joined by fine art dealers in realizing the enduring value of his work.  A major revival was soon under way with both fresh fashion-shoot commissions from Vogue and a series of large-scale fine art prints of his best images. Many of these were created using the very expensive platinum printing process. These are photographic prints made by a process that provides the greatest tonal range of any printing method using chemical development. This is an ideal medium for this photographer, especially for his nude studies.  Male Nude of 1952, for example, reveals his lifelong interest in classical antiquity both architectural and in it treatment of the human form. Precise control of lighting highlights every nuance of his subject’s musculature. The body ripples and glows like an abstract landscape: a truly bravura finale to this already sumptuous show.  

One of the difficulties with blockbuster art shows is that, amidst the glories, the subtle detail of a style or career of an artist can be lost. Not so here, from the sensitive minimal directional lighting (which in itself is homage to the lighting style of Horst) to the well written and informative text and floor plan,  a clear reading of his development and work is that much  easier.

Drawing on a range of archives, including those of Condé Nastand the Horst Estate, the exhibition also draws on the holdings of the V&A’s own collections and thus (and importantly) encourages a further exploration of the relationships between a variety of visual media exploited so well by Horst.  As well as a world-leading collection of fashion, the V&A also houses the national collection of the Art of Photography and The National Art (reference) Library, both housed on the floor above this exhibition. So, there should be no excuse in tracing the development of style. Style, not fashion, being what Horst himself was ultimately all about.