Horst P. Horst valuation
Sixty years with Vogue, and the Mainbocher Corset, photographed in Paris on the eve of the Second World War.
Horst P. Horst was born Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann at Weissenfels in Germany in 1906, studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg, and went to Paris in 1930 to study with Le Corbusier.
What a work by Horst P. Horst is worth
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Bio
Horst P. Horst was born Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann at Weissenfels in Germany in 1906, studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg, and went to Paris in 1930 to study with Le Corbusier. There he met the Vogue photographer George Hoyningen-Huene, became his model and companion, and published his first photograph in French Vogue in 1931. The style that followed borrowed from classical sculpture and the theatre: sculpted light, deep shadow, painted backdrops and a studied stillness. The Mainbocher Corset of 1939, taken in his last Paris session before the war, is the best-known image. He moved to New York, served in the US Army, became an American citizen in 1943 under the name Horst P. Horst, and worked for Conde Nast for most of six decades. He died in 1999.
Three kinds of print need telling apart. Vintage gelatin silver prints were made at the time for Vogue and often carry the publisher's stamps on the verso. From the 1980s Horst issued signed platinum-palladium prints of his best-known images in editions, physically different objects from the vintage prints even where the image is the same. Estate prints made after his death are a third category. Print date, process, signature and stamps therefore identify the work, and copyright in much of the commissioned work sits with Conde Nast, whose stamps are part of reading a vintage print. Toning, silvering and damage to the mount are the usual condition concerns.
La Plume d'Or, Chanel and Valentine Lawford
Horst's first exhibition, at La Plume d'Or in Paris in 1932, was reviewed by Janet Flanner in The New Yorker, which made him known at once. He met Coco Chanel in 1937 and photographed her fashions for three decades, and his 1942 portrait of Marlene Dietrich used lighting she objected to and then adopted for her own publicity.
In 1938 he met the British diplomat Valentine Lawford, with whom he lived until Lawford's death in 1991. In the 1960s, encouraged by Diana Vreeland, he photographed the houses and lives of international society for Vogue. His last photograph for British Vogue, in 1991, was of Princess Michael of Kent, and he died at his home in Palm Beach in November 1999.
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