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175
of Steichen's fashion photographs are on display in the beautiful Edward
Steichen: In High Fashion, The Condé Nast Years 1923-1937 at ICP.
Steichen
(1879-1973) had a long and varied career - he started off as a
painter and Pictorialist photographer. Along the way, he
founded the Photo-Secession group with Alfred Stieglitz and was
instrumental in introducing European artists such as Matisse,
Rodin, and Cézanne to New York at Stieglitz's Gallery 291.
Steichen was also director for Aerial Photography for the Allied
Forces during World War I and towards the end of his career was
Director of Photography at MoMA.
But
it was in the years after World War I, when Steichen began to move
away from his earlier Pictorialist style toward a more Modernist
aesthetic as chief photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue
in the 20S and 30s, that he created his most brilliant and
beautiful work. Many of his fashion and advertising
photographs taken for Vogue and Vanity Fair are
portraits, and there is a strange, timeless beauty in their
perfectly-constructed aestheticism - an architectural
consciousness of line that is softened by a certain soulfulness of
face or fluidity in line of fabric. Steichen created a
stunning fusion of fashion photograph and portrait - and his work
in this area has never been quite matched by any of his
successors. The heightened style of these photographs is on
display in the first ever comprehensive show of these iconic
images.
Steichen
created high art in his fashion photography, allying the artistic
and the commercial to elicit haunting beauty from both subject and
clothes. A photograph of Greta Garbo displays her signature
cold, hard beauty but something new as well: a quixotic, almost
self-reflective quality. There is Joan Crawford in a dress
by Schiaparelli or an unnamed model wearing Molyneux, or the
fabulous Model Marion Morehouse and unidentified model wearing
dresses by Vionnet, 1930, pictured above. And then there
is the marvelous Gloria Swanson, the actress turbaned and
enigmatic behind a dark flower-patterned netted veil from which
she stares out with animal intensity.
See:
Edward
Steichen: In High Fashion, The Condé Nast Years 1923-1937 at ICP,
through May 3, 2009
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Edward
Steichen,
Gloria Swanson, 1924 |
