29 September 2014
With one of the most exhaustive retrospectives ever devoted to the artist, the Victoria & Albert Museum is celebrating the career of Horst P. Horst, undisputed master of photographic elegance. The exhibition is divided into chapters: the surrealism of the late thirties, the portraits of stars and artists, the studio work, the experiments on the textures of the natural world. Even the pictures he took on the journeys he made to the Middle East with his lifelong companion, the British diplomat Valentine Lawford. Horst’s immense output reveals the mutual interactions between the different approaches that were fused in his refined style, sustained by a consummate technique and eye for detail: the avant-garde blending into the fledgling language of advertising, his ability to remain a stylistic point of reference both before and after the Second World War, the shift from black and white to color. Not to be missed.
Horst P. Horst, Horst. Photographer of Style
Victoria & Albert Museum
London
September 6, 2014 > January 4, 2015
Summer Fashions, American Vogue Cover, 1941. © Condé Nast / Horst Estate.
Muriel Maxwell, American Vogue, 1939. © Condé Nast / Horst Estate.
Dinner suit and headdress by Schiaparelli, 1947. © Condé Nast / Horst Estate.
Round the Clock, New York, 1987. © Condé Nast / Horst Estate.
Male Nude, 1952. © Condé Nast / Horst Estate.
Dress by Hattie Carnegie, 1939. © Condé Nast / Horst Estate.
Marlene Dietrich, New York, 1942. © Condé Nast / Horst Estate.
Corset by Detolle for Mainbocher, 1939. © Condé Nast / Horst Estate.
Salvador Dalí’s costumes for Leonid Massine’s ballet Bacchanale, 1939. © Condé Nast / Horst Estate.
View of ruins at the palace of Persepolis, Persia, 1949. © Condé Nast / Horst Estate.