Glamor in the face – Newspaper Kommersant No. 59 (7504) dated 04/06/2023

The Venetian Palazzo Grassi hosts the exhibition “Chronorama. Treasures of photography of the 20th century. Hundreds of very famous and very rare shots from the Conde Nast archive, taken by the classics of fashion photography from Adolphe de Meyer to Helmut Newton, were bought into the François Pinault collection and are now out of stock for the first time. Tells Maria Sidelnikova.

Charlie Chaplin is very young, without a mustache and a bowler hat, Einstein is combed. Alexander Calder plays the wire circus, Matisse feeds his birds. Chanel in pose, Greta Garbo in image. Next to these glossy pictures is Stalin with a bouquet, and next door sits Churchill in a resolute pose of “emphasis on his knees.” The Vanderbilts feast in grand style when the US is already one foot in the war. London is bombed, the Parisian resistance smoke at ease on the barricades. The mountains of sandbags in front of Notre Dame in 1944 look just like the mountains of rubbish today, except for children jumping on them. De Gaulle emerges from the shadows victorious, Irving Penn in military uniform. Francis Bacon is shaking his meat carcasses, Pollock is about to splatter paint from a bucket, Lucio Fontana is preparing to tear apart a virgin-white canvas. Beauties Twiggy and Verushka, Liz Taylor, Sophia Loren, Anouk Aimé, Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau… Young Jagger, Jones, Cohen and Lagerfeld – as if alive, with a thick black beard. Cinema, music and fashion icons. Doctor Zhivago, space, cigarettes. Schwarzenegger flaunts caricatured muscles, model Lisa Taylor devours with her eyes a man’s torso in white trousers.

The exhibition “Chronorama” – a neologism born from “chronos” and “panorama” – decade after decade spins back the 20th century, collected mainly in faces, through the pages of Conde Nast publications. Taken out of the context of the magazine, the pictures have taken on a life of their own. Mathieu Hamery, François Pinault’s curator and chief photography consultant, spent several years in the archives of Vogue, Vanity Fair, House & Garden, GQ, Glamour, to select images that are iconic to history – surreal and fashion experiments, absolute icons and unknown masterpieces. Classics of the century, sacred monsters of fashion photography – Adolph de Meyer, Edward Steichen, André Kertész, Margaret Bourke-White, Horst P. Horst, Lee Miller, Diane Arbus, Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton – all worked for Vogue and others publishing giant magazines. In terms of prices, this period (beginning of the century, wars and after them) is the most reliable in photography. And although this market is worthless compared to contemporary art, Pinot is still slowly taking over. The collection already has an impressive selection of Irving Penn, but a couple of years ago, in 2021, it was replenished with the Conde Nast archive. We bought thousands of photographs (originals in the collection, reprint rights from the publishing house), four hundred exhibited. Coverage is a powerful temporal layer of black and white photography, from the 1910s, when hand-drawn illustration covers gradually pass the baton to photographers who make piece rather than mass shots, until the late 1970s, when gloss finally surrenders to color and a new generation of authors.

Topics – obvious and not so obvious – in the “Chronorama” is more than enough for several exhibitions. There is an up-to-date women’s agenda (where without it?), represented by rare names and plots. Margaret Bourke-White, the first female accredited military correspondent, filmed both Pearl Harbor and the USSR, and also worked for Vogue between the two wars, when Edward Steichen and Cecil Beaton set the tone for the magazine. But she wasn’t filming the war, but the architecture, which had just begun to fall into the lens of photographers – tennis courts on the roofs of monumental New York skyscrapers. Undeservedly forgotten Dora Kalmus, known both in her native Vienna and in Paris under the pseudonym Madame D’Ora, one of the pioneers of fashion photography, has been actively returning to museums in recent years. In the Pino collection, it is represented by a portrait of the Parisian Japanese Tsuguharu Fujita. Men, including Klimt and Picasso, posed for her as willingly as women – Lempicka, Chanel, Schiaparelli. From curatorial findings and a portrait of the German sculptor Rene Sintenis by Steffi Brandl, published in Vogue. Everyone knows Sintenis without knowing: in 1951, she created the famous figurine of the “Golden Bear” of the Berlinale, but before that, in Nazi Germany, an emancipated artist with a very modern, androgynous appearance, half Jewish, drank in full.

From the unpublished, but secret – a portrait of the American military surgeon Mary Walker. She went down in history as the first woman to publicly appear in trousers. In this 1911 photograph taken for Vanity Fair by Paul Thompson, in a man’s suit, a hat, an American flag-colored cane umbrella under her arm, she hangs next to the delicate, elegant young ladies of the turn of the century. Among them is Anna Pavlova in an oriental costume with black braids according to the stage fashions of those times. Shooting for Vogue in 1917, most likely based on the one-act ballet “Peri” by Ivan Khlyustin about a beautiful Persian maiden. The same year, the same Pavlova, but already in the garden in Caracas and for Vanity Fair: a sharp profile, a romantic hat, silk frills – a true trendsetter and style icon. Echoes of the glory of the Diaghilev enterprise can be heard in photographs before the war. Fashionable pupils of the Russian impresario did not leave the magazine pages, as evidenced by the exhibition. Serge Lifar in Myasin’s Lost Ode to music by Nikolai Nabokov (1928, Sarah Bernard Theater in Paris). The same Lifar, but with Olga Spesivtseva, languid Bacchus and Ariadne dressed as de Chirico for the Paris Opera ballet of the same name in 1931. These unique shots of the lost ballet history were made by the classic Georgy Fedorovich Goiningen-Hühne. From ballet rarities and portraits of Kira Nijinska in The Phantom of the Rose (1935). In the lens of the great Cecil Beaton, she looks like an absolute copy of her father in his own cult ballet, in which Vaclav was last seen on stage before illness made him a hermit. The ballet line continues to dance with portraits of Fred Astaire, Jerome Robbins and Jose Limon, Nureyev and Balanchine with Susan Farrell (how wonderfully Bert Stern noticed the animal passion of the choreographer and the innocence of his latest muse!). And even Henri Cartier-Bresson also dances, sternly looking from the portrait of Irving Penn at his first wife, the Indian dancer Ratna Mohini.