This spring at the Biennale Fashion & Style in Photography, Erwin Blumenfeldâs exhibition is one of the highlights of the program. His work seems to absorb all the best and most stereotypical i.e., classic things that make up good photography in our minds. Nude nature female, naturally â graceful, delicate, but not sensual, almost not erotic. Witty experiments with form, color, texture, and the technical possibilities of photography-all the great discoveries of the avant-garde 1930s: collage, editing, highlighting, solarization, visual puzzles, mirrors and reflections, multiple exposures, an unusual take on the familiar. Classic fashion photography of the 30s and 50s â refined, understated, aristocratic luxury.
Erwin Blumenfeld
Self Portrait. Paris. Ok. 1938
Silver-gelatin print
The Ellen and Yorick Blumenfeld Collection
© The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld
Blumenfeldâs biography, full of adventure and drama, is also classic in its own way: in the way he lived his life and in the way he treated art. A German Jew who had lived through the horrors of World War I as a young man, who had lived in various countries, who had battled circumstances, who had been in camps and finally settled in New York, where he was an instant success. Ignorance of the language, a large family, and the difficulties of emigration donât get in the way if you have talent, a reputation, a will to live and an unrelenting desire to express yourself in your art.
Blumenfeldâs attitude toward photography is also quite typical of a classicist of the first half and middle of the century. He loves women, heâs obsessed with female form and beauty, but his nudes are cold, heâs deliberately aloof. He transforms admiration, lust, and fear into deformations, deconstructions, and bizarre grotesques. Not too radical, though. A typical surrealist approach to the female character, but not breaking the limits of decency, not contradicting the usual, traditional notions of beauty, but not satisfying the mass taste âBeauty doesnât have to be prettyâ .
In America, Blumenfeld is a witty, highly cultured and highly paid fashion photographer. Embodying exquisite visual formulas, fond of pictorial associations, masterful with color, inventing unconventional techniques and producing spectacular photographs. Simple and elegantly laconic, but looking so unusual that even professionals often donât understand how they are made. And yet Blumenfeld does not consider his work in this field to be art or creativity. Commercial photography is not noble enough. Carefully selected by Blumenfeld himself, his portfolio, the book âOne hundred of my best photographs,â includes only four pictures taken for glossy magazines.
This is the view held by many classics, separating work âfor yourselfâ and âto make moneyâ. And they also leave the fashion industry in the early 1960s, when new times came and certain conventional standards were flouted here as well, in favor of the âmass,â âaccessible,â and âvulgar.â. Financial Times columnist Francis Hodgson of one of Blumenfeldâs exhibitions called him a wittier experimentalist than Man Ray and more expressive as a fashion innovator than Irving Penn.
Erwin Blumenfeld
Three profiles. Photographic version,
published in Photograph Annual for the article âColor and Lightâ. 1952
Inkjet printing on barite paper, 2012
The Henry Blumenfeld Collection
© The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld
Erwin Blumenfeld
A variant of the cover for American Vogue, âAnd You Made a Contribution for the Red Cross?â. March 15, 1945.
Inkjet print on barite paper, 2012
The Henry Blumenfeld Collection
© The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld
Erwin Blumenfeld
Cecil Beaton, photographer. 1946
Partial Solarization
Vintage silver-gelatin printing
Switzerland, private collection
© The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld
An opinion not canonical, but possible. Blumenfeld can probably be called the Raphael of the world of fashion and art photography. The gold standard, the golden mean, but âthe mean of geniusâ â absolute harmony, synthesis of realism, stylization, beauty, femininity, grace, taste. And it was all formed and formed from the integral components associated with the artistic milieu of the turn of the century: rebellion, experimentation, doubt, non-conformism, Dadaism and Surrealism.
For all the exemplary and exemplary nature of Blumenfeldâs history and work, of course, are not without minor details, âpunctums.â. The abstract of the exhibition states that his life and work can âserve as a documentary source on the history of the world sociopolitical sceneâ of the relevant period. As we can see, this is indeed true, and it is evident even at a cursory glance. But nevertheless, there are meaningful little things.
For example, looking at the photos from Vogue, one suddenly notices the wrinkles around the modelâs eyes and understands how different the aristocratic glamour of the 1940s is from todayâs standards. Blumenfeldâs models look like mature women with a meaningful look and personal history, albeit indistinguishable under a cloak of impeccable elegance. Or hereâs an interesting fact: Blumenfeld was the first to photograph a black model, Bunny Yelverton, for Vogue in 1958. True, placed on the edge of the frame so that in case of public outcry, it could be cut off.
Blumenfeldâs personal life fits in well with the notions of patriarchal âbohemiaâ â with young mistresses and other pranks, but it was he who came up with the idea of finding and photographing an 80-year-old Rodin model nude, who in her youth posed for the famous sculpture âThe Kissâ. It speaks to his thinking about the diversity of sensory experience and how it translates into images of art and media.
Judging by his autobiography, as well as the recollections of those who knew him, Blumenfeld never took himself or his work seriously, just as he apparently did the world around him. The irony and caustic sarcasm of his texts, however, does not contradict the escapism of his work. The man who survived war, the troubled thirties, camps, removals, loves and fame, who developed benchmarks and models of photographic excellence for contemporaries and posterity, who ultimately committed extravagant suicide â thatâs who Erwin Blumenfeld is.
We donât know everything about him yet. After his death, the prints, drawings, collages and negatives were equally divided between his three children and his young mistress. Until recently, all of this has existed in fragmented form, much of it never exhibited or published. Now his grandchildren are working to put everything together and systematize, at least virtually. So, there may be more discoveries to come. Hardly principled and large, but surely not uninteresting for the history of photography, fashion, and our views on the past century.
Erwin Blumenfeld
Audrey Hepburn, actress. New York. 1950-e
Silver-gelatin vintage stamp
Switzerland, private collection
© The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld
Erwin Blumenfeld
Naked under moist silk. Paris. 1937
Vintage silver-gelatin printing
Switzerland, private collection
© The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld
Erwin Blumenfeld
Natalia Pasko. New York. 1942
Vintage silver-gelatin printing
The Henry Blumenfeld Collection
© The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld
Erwin Blumenfeld
Lisa Fonsagrives on the Eiffel Tower. Paris. 1939
Vintage silver-gelatin print
Modernism Inc., San Francisco
© The Estate of Erwin Blumenfeld
What is the significance of the golden ratio in the work of Erwin Blumenfeld and how did it contribute to his brilliance and artistic genius?