September 17, 2005
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Defining Beauty Through Avedon
Courtesy of the Richard Avedon Foundation
Courtesy of the Richard Avedon Foundation
LOUISE AVEDON
New York in 1941.
Courtesy of the Richard Avedon Foundation
DOVIMA
Paris in 1950.
Courtesy the Richard Avedon Foundation
LIZ PRINGLE
Jamaica in February 1959.
September 18, 2005
Defining Beauty Through Avedon
By PHILIP GEFTER
RICHARD AVEDON honored women. For nearly half a century, taking photographs for the top two fashion magazines in the world, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, women were the subject and the target of his insistent, yet sympathetic gaze. From the models in his fashion tableaux to his later, unembellished portraits of artists, writers, intellectuals, socialites and hardscrabble workers in the American West, his regard for the fully realized individual remained constant.
At first, Avedon practiced taking fashion pictures of his beautiful younger sister, Louise, and throughout “Woman in the Mirror” (Abrams), a new collection of Avedon’s pictures, that respectful posture turns all women into the potential sister – an undeniably beautiful, but deeply kindred spirit. There is an erotic component to some of these pictures, but he seems less concerned with men’s arousal than with the subtle cues women take from one another, a view that places sexuality in a larger constellation of human qualities.
After being discovered by Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper’s Bazaar, Avedon began taking photographs for the magazine in 1947, the year Dior introduced the New Look and just two years before Simone de Beauvoir’s “Second Sex” was published. The New Look was modernity incarnate and the sculptural lines and cosmopolitan flourishes were perfect for Avedon, who seized upon it to make cinematic images in which the models inhabited the clothes like characters in a movie. And, as if Simone de Beauvoir were looking over his shoulder, Avedon’s photography animated women with spirit and determination.
Through Avedon’s eyes, female beauty is not viewed with distrust, as a collection of wiles and veils that can manipulate, obfuscate or seduce. In one photograph, the model Liz Pringle stands effortlessly poised in a boat, with the manner of an heiress in a breezy movie from the 1950′s. She holds a cigarette and looks our way with the sly grin of a secret shared, as if we are among her closest friends. You know the picture is all about the clothes, but the soignée sophistication of the scene is what draws you in.
He had many muses, among them Dovima, whose name alone conjures an exotic creature of myth. (In fact, Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba created her name from the first two letters of each of her given names.) In one Avedon picture, she wears a dress by Jacques Fath, and it appears as something sacred and ceremonial, Dovima assuming the stature of a pageant queen.
His photograph of Penelope Tree is as much a portrait of the real society girl as it is a model wearing the latest fashion. The pants suit was a new concept at the time, the bell bottom an emerging style; his picture is playful and free-spirited, and she strikes a Pippi Longstocking note – unconventional but all grown up, cosmopolitan and top-of-the-moment, out in the world on her own terms.
And his portrait of the writer Renata Adler is stripped of decoration, leaving the anatomy of her face, the intransigence of her posture and the gravity of her braid to represent a modern-day Athena, goddess of the intellect, taking our measure as much as we take hers.
“Dick had a very particular taste for what he thought was a beautiful woman,” said Norma Stevens, executive director of the Richard Avedon Foundation. Paging through the book in her New York office, she stopped at a portrait of a seemingly downtrodden young woman from his series “In the American West.” “To him, Debbie McClendon’s fragility and tenderness resembled a Botticelli.”
Movie history has permanently married Richard Avedon to Audrey Hepburn thanks to “Funny Face,” starring Fred Astaire as the fashion photographer Dick Avery, who is based on Avedon. In the book, “Richard Avedon: Made in France,” Judith Thurman writes that “Funny Face” is an artifact of a remote, lost civilization. Three of its purest pleasures have not dated: Hepburn’s face, Givenchy’s couture, and Astaire’s dancing – all pertinent, the dancing, in particular, to Avedon’s work.
She equates Astaire’s buoyancy to Avedon’s pictures, the classical discipline with which the dancer, like the photographer, made the artificial and rehearsed seem effervescent and spontaneous.
Avedon distilled a variety of elements into a simple and distinct visual signature: the element of surprise, for example, in his most famous picture of Dovima with the elephants at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, the large, bulbous creatures forming a backdrop of unharnessed animal instinct against which the elegance of high fashion stands in dramatic relief. Or glamour in his picture of Sunny Harnett, the top model in her day, at a posh European casino; he made her shimmer like a Hitchcock blonde in a Madame Grès dress. Or wit in his picture of Carmen stepping off the ground, as if by wearing a Pierre Cardin coat you, too, could be walking on air.
He played a stunning hand with visual onomatopoeia as well: his portrait of Katharine Hepburn with her mouth opened elicits the very sound of her distinctive accent; his portrait of Louise Nevelson, with her heavy eyeliner and sculptural jewelry, turns her into one of her own works of art; and his portrait of Marella Agnelli, in which her elongated neck conjures Modigliani, her entire form as graceful as a Brancusi.
Despite decades of imitators, Avedon has proved inimitable. His curiosity fueled his imagination. He anticipated the tone of each era with a sophistication that was precision-cut in the stratosphere of art, fashion and culture at which he so naturally, and tenaciously, hovered. He never stopped experimenting with the photographic image and, always, his pictures reflect a regard for women that was truly debonair.
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