It was no earlier than the release of Martin Harrison’s seminal publication “Appearances” in 1991 when Bassman and Himmel came once more into the focus of international attention. The eye of the time detected in them what earlier generations had failed to see: two self-accomplished authors whose work had not merely encompassed the limitations of standard commercial assignments but had revolutionized the fashion industry with its sophistication and experimental character. For Bassman and Himmel were uniquely different. If the era that had bred them celebrated naturalism in its uttering materialistic glamour (Irving Penn) and post-war life in its effusiveness (Richard Avedon), they opted for an atmosphere of evanescence, appearances and disappearances. Regardless whether it was a lingerie editorial or a street shooting, their impressionist-like pictures incessantly transcribed the fleeting interiority of their sitters and of the external urban world that surrounded them.
“The designer intended a column of chiffon and you have given me a butterfly. Lillian, you are not here to make art, you are here to show the buttons and the bows!” In 1949, Lillian Bassman shot the Paris collections for Harper’s Bazaar, but Carmel Snow was at odds with the oblique final results. With the help of a window glass, the transparent Piquet dress had been transformed to a butterfly! This was about as far as Lillian could go! Or perhaps not… The pictures published in the March 1950 issue would reach an unthinkable anti-realism for the time that involved total elimination of every detail. There were no dresses any longer, but painterly masses, light and shadows. Lillian had printed the negatives through a tiny hole by exposing only selected areas, and had erased the outlines by applying parches of colour onto the positive.
Bassman did not imitate the style of her female colleagues – and they were quite a few in the forties. Before the dynamism of Toni Frissel and the photojournalistic view of Louise Dahl-Wold, her women seemed to have little to do with politics, society or household banality. Neither did they carry anything from Avedon’s ethereal monumentality. Hers was an overtly intimate approach. Her lingerie and bathing suit editorials for Harper’s Bazaar expressed a romantic and idiosyncratic femininity. Bassman was renowned for her long sessions and for the rapport she would establish with her models in order to bring out their inner mood and aura. By developing a method of enlarging through tissue, she was able to produce out of focus prints alluding to a sensuous dream world, whereby the models, their faces and garments would literally disappear. For Lillian Bassman understood before anyone else that fashion was all about inner mood, emotion and elegance.
By contrast, Paul Himmel’s gaze seems at first sight to be driven by documentary concerns. Unfortunately, most of his fashion photographs do not survive, but what remains makes it clear: his camera pointed at the street, its dynamism and the fleeting moment of an urban life replete of fragility. Himmel imbued his “decisive moment” with movement that culminated into a poetic, subjective quality. His pictures show a multiplicity of human bodies flirting with the intangible in the rash of the metropolis. Out-of-focus and blurry, they are as much as moody and atmospheric as Lillian’s work, while sometimes preserving an unsettling aura, dissonant with the spirit of his post-war contemporaries.
An autodidact himself, Himmel took up photography as a teenager, much earlier than Bassman, and for many years he combined his hobby with teaching. In 1946 he went on to study graphic journalism under Brodovitch, his mentor, who used to remark: “Among all, Paul is the best in movement.” A few years later, in 1954, Paul would pay homage to the legendary art director and his distinct feel with his book “Ballet in Action”. Constructed on long exposures, the use of grainy film, high contrasts, dance and poetry, Paul Himmel’s ballet stills were celebrated by the famous chorographer George Balanchine. But Himmel soon took his artistic concerns a step further. In his seminal work on nudes published in the sixties, movement is replaced by evanescence. Bodily forms become so elongated and abbreviated that they eventually vanish, in a graphic imitation of Giacometti’s sculptures.
In the fifties and sixties the couple celebrated their consolidation. In 1951 they opened their studio, formed a family, and in 1956 one of Paul’s pictures was included in Steichen’s “Family of Man”. They produced more personal work and experimented in the darkroom. But times were changing. After the negative reception of his “Nudes”, Paul felt discouraged and in the early seventies he dropped photography for psychotherapy. By that time, Lillian’s increasing disenchantment with the fashion’s changing ethics also led her to undertake teaching in Parson’s School and painting. She was to make her professional comeback, shooting for John Galliano, Vogue and New York Times in the nineties, when interest on her work underwent a revival. Since then, the couple has been enjoying their resurgence through exhibitions and books, but even so a comprehensive record of their artistic production in unison has been missing to this day. Now the Hamburg retrospective, compiled by a series of iconic photographs, other still unpublished vintage prints and a documentary film, comes to fill in this gap and let the world know about two of the greatest artistic personalities of all times. “A unique opportunity not to miss”, in the words of Brigitte Woischnik, who has curated the show with Ingo Taubhorn.
Natasha Christia: When and how was the idea for the exhibition born?
Brigitte Woischnik: A long time ago, I was introduced to Lillian, Paul and their amazing work. Lillian has been a famous photographer but nobody in the photography world really knew much about the great Paul Himmel after the late sixties. Nobody had ever been able to see their work in conjunction. Stunned, I realized what an outstanding creative couple they had been. Each of them is unique but, if you look at their photographs, you see their joined life and work. I spoke to them about my idea of an exhibition and they granted me their approval. In 2003, I curated a little show in F 5,6 Gallerie in Munich and went on looking for a museum. Again with F 5,6, we showed some images of Paul Himmel during Paris Photo 2006. F.C. Gundlach, the famous German photographer, collector and founder of the House of Photography / Deichtorhallen Hamburg, came to the booth with Ingo Taubhorn, the museum curator. They looked through Paul Himmel’s images with great interest and I told them that Paul Himmel is Lillian Bassman’s husband. Mr. Gundlach owns some Lillian Bassman prints and included them in the most recent exhibition of his collection. Ingo Taubhorn gave me his card, I visited them in Hamburg a couple of times and when it was decided in October 2007, Ingo told me the good news. I was thrilled! By that time Lillian Bassman was 91 and Paul Himmel 93. We all knew we had to try and do it as fast as possible! But to let Lillian and Paul know that there will be a retrospective of them together filled me with tremendous joy!
NC: So, you had the privilege of working closely with the couple in the selection of the images. How would you describe the idiosyncrasy of each one of them after so many years?
BW: In 2007, I hired a cameraman to tape two interviews with Lillian and Paul. I was so scared of their age and wanted to have a document! The first interview was conducted at their house on Fire Island and the other one in New York. In August 2008, I introduced Ingo Taubhorn to them. We all spent almost a week in New York and discussed how we would work together. Ingo immediately discovered the historic value of their work. During that very week, they were excited, interested, helpful, inspiring, but also extremely calm due to their characters. For Paul and Lillian had shared a life of almost 78 years together. They stayed unique and each of them was able to develop a career on their own. They both shared the same interests and their children. They almost seem symbiotic, though this is not the right word to describe them. To me “each of them fills in the part of what might be missing in the other”. In her most recent book, which has been produced by her son Eric Himmel, there is a remark by Lillian on the last page: “To my husband Paul Himmel who always believed in me!” This statement speaks for itself.
NC: Still, Paul Himmel died last February and you had to continue solely with Lillian Bassman. Could you describe those moments?
BW: We arrived in New York in January 2009, when Paul Himmel had his first stroke and was in hospital. The family was with him 24 hours. Ellen Liebermann, Paul’s assistant for the last three years, guided us through his work. We discovered the most amazing images, negatives, vintage works and much more. Like two moles we worked through them and made the first selection. We visited Paul’s Gallery, Keith De Lillis, and went through all the images there, made a small selection and went down to Kelton Lab, where we found many prints ready for us to take. Every item we selected was photographed, archived and packed. Ingo left after ten days and I did a couple of days later, after they had brought Paul back home. A week later, Paul Himmel died.
NC: To my knowledge, there is very little material of Paul Himmel’s fashion, and Lillian Bassman is said to have jettisoned in the early seventies negatives of years of commercial work! In which state did you encounter the archive of the two photographers? Did you have to resort to the archives of Harper’s Bazaar?
BW: At Hearst there is no archive! Hard to believe, isn’t it? We found more than anyone could possibly imagine at the Bassman / Himmel studio. Paul Himmel had cleaned out his commercial fashion photography in the late sixties but all his great experimental work was still there – ballet, architecture and street scenes, nudes, sports, family and friends, besides solarisations and other experiments, all conducted in the late sixties. Lillian had also cleaned out her commercial pictures, but, luckily, after fifteen years they came by chance across the garbage bag and pretty much most of the material she had overworked.
NC: On which level do you trace the influences between Himmel and Bassman? Though they never photographed in conjunction, they share an extraordinary universe of abstraction, intimacy and formal sensuality …
BW: In many ways they shared their work, but each of them stayed unique. Till his end, Paul was arguing that he had taught Lillian how to take a picture. This was in a sense true. Lillian started later, in the middle of her career as an art director for Junior Bazaar, by working in the lab with other photographers’ negatives. She wanted to get something different out of a negative, and since she was an artist she began from there before she ever took a picture with a camera.
Their oeuvre is totally different but you can see that they had shared a studio. They lived side by side, so they might have discussed different ways to experiment and often helped each other. While Paul was shooting the ballet pictures, Lillian was designing the book for him. In the sixties Paul experimented with the solarisation in colour. As we discovered, Lillian had also tried it in black and white. They both had a crash on black and white; both worked in their own darkroom. Paul was a master in movement, while Lillian created the movement in the lab. To say it in her own words according to an interview she gave in 1951: "Paul is, I feel, a better photographer. His work is virile, it's more direct and he deals with the world as it actually is. Photographically speaking, we're probably as close as you could come to opposites. I'm completely tied up with softness, fragility and the personal problems of a feminine world."
NC: But she was the one who came back to photography in the nineties, whereas Paul didn’t. How do you evaluate her latest works?
BW: We will integrate some of Lillian's latest prints in the show. She started to work again after Martin Harrison, who had edited her last book, incited her to do so. Up to this day, she is working on new projects employing digital manipulation. She is so wonderful! But what a few people know is that in the last years Paul Himmel archived his work with the help of his assistant. He also used Photoshop to experiment with colours and crop pictures to different sizes. Through this technique they both reinvented their work in a new way.
NC: How would you describe la raison d’être of this retrospective? What is the contribution of both photographers to the world of photography?
BW: Their contribution is of a historic value! You can put them side by side with many photographers of their time, like Helen Lewitt, Ilse Bing and many more. To me, Lillian is the most outstanding Fashion Photographer. I have found her artistic quality in no one else! She knew through instinct and her feminine intuition how to show a woman in fashion and beauty and all over. Following on this, the ambition of this show is no other but to honour two of the greatest artists in photography through the world. My true dream is to watch one day the show coming back to New York, to the Whitney Museum. Paul and Lillian used to live just a few blocks away!
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.
All images: Lillian Bassman – Paul Himmel
Exhibition:
Lillian Bassman & Paul Himmel. Eine Retrospective
Curators:
Ingo Taubhorn, Haus der Photographie
Brigitte Woischnik, Foto Factory
Exhibition:
November, 27, 2009-February, 21, 2010
Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg
Published in Eyemazing 04/2009
