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FEATURED ARTISTS
#Lillian Bassman
  • FEATURED ARTISTS #Lillian Bassman
  • FEATURED ARTISTS #Lillian Bassman
  • FEATURED ARTISTS #Lillian Bassman

  • THE POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY
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    • Lillian Bassman
    • Cig Harvey
  • Lillian Bassman

    United States, 1917-2012

    " She's looking for something that is almost a self-portrait... of elegance, of strength - her image of what women are all about"

     

    ~Lizzie Himmel

    Ms. Bassman entered the world of magazine editing and fashion photography as a protégé of Alexey Brodovitch, the renowned art director of Harper’s Bazaar. In late 1945, when the magazine generated a spinoff called Junior Bazaar, aimed at teenage girls, she was asked to be its art director, a title she shared with Mr. Brodovitch, at his insistence. In addition to providing innovative graphic design, Ms. Bassman gave prominent display to future photographic stars like Richard Avedon, Robert Frank and Louis Faurer, whose work whetted her appetite to become a photographer herself.

    Read more

    Already, at Harper’s Bazaar, she had begun frequenting the darkroom on her lunch hours to develop images by the great fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene, using tissues and gauzes to bring selected areas of a picture into focus and applying bleach to manipulate tone.

    “I was interested in developing a method of printing on my own, even before I took photographs,” Ms. Bassman told B&W magazine in 1994. “I wanted everything soft edges and cropped.” She was interested, she said, in “creating a new kind of vision aside from what the camera saw."

  • Explore selected works

    Lillian Bassman, Barbara Mullen, (Flat Hat Bare Back), c.1950 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Lillian Bassman, Anne Saint-Marie, New York, 1958 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Lillian Bassman, Spanish Prints on Yellow, on ToreroPink, Barbara Mullen, dress byCarolyn Schnurer, 1955 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Lillian Bassman, Born to Dance: Margie Cato in a dress by Emily Wilkins, New York, 1950 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Lillian Bassman, Black and White, Mary Jane Russell, Le Pavillon, New York, 1950 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Lillian Bassman, Woman on Fleche D'Or, c. 1950 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Lillian Bassman, Barbara Mullen, (Flat Hat Bare Back), c.1950
  • Archive posts

    • THE POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY #660 “There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea” ~ Henry James “Long necks. The thrust of the head in a certain position. The way the fingers work, fabrics work. It’s all part of my painting background” ~ Lillian Bassman I must say I agree with Mr James. Breakfast meetings are just too early. Power lunches just too pretentious. Just offer me a wonderful high tea rendezvous and I’ll be there in a flash. Lillian with her consistent elegance and panache, captures the moment beautifully aided by the exquisite Carmen Dell’Orefice.

       THE POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY #660

      “There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea”

       

      ~ Henry James

       “Long necks. The thrust of the head in a certain position. The way the fingers work, fabrics work. It’s all part of my painting background”

       

      ~ Lillian Bassman

       

      I must say I agree with Mr James. Breakfast meetings are just too early. Power lunches just too pretentious. Just offer me a wonderful high tea rendezvous and I’ll be there in a flash. Lillian with her consistent elegance and panache, captures the moment beautifully aided by the exquisite Carmen Dell’Orefice.

    • THE POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY #564 “A great designer does not seek acceptance. He challenges popularity, and by the force his convictions renders popular in the end what the public hates at first sight.” ~ Charles James During the many years I collaborated with Lillian she was always working, always trying something new and pushing the envelope. She was a creative force of nature. This is the quintessence of a great 1950’s fashion shot. One of the greatest fashion photographers ever, one of the greatest designers ever, Charles James and one of the great fashion models of the era Sunny Harnett.

       THE POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY #564

      “A great designer does not seek acceptance. He challenges popularity, and by the force his convictions renders popular in the end what the public hates at first sight.”

      ~ Charles James 

      During the many years I collaborated with Lillian she was always working, always trying something new and pushing the envelope. She was a creative force of nature. This is the quintessence of a great 1950’s fashion shot. One of the greatest fashion photographers ever, one of the greatest designers ever, Charles James and one of the great fashion models of the era Sunny Harnett.

    • THE POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY #567 “I understood that synergistic dance between photographer and object-“muse” if you will, “model” whatever you call us. It’s that client language of communication, like being psychic with each other.” ~ Carmen Dell 'Orefice "You know it is a long creative life and if you do the same thing every day it doesn't work. You don't become creative anymore" ~ Lillian Bassman Carmen is now 90 years old, still beautiful and still working. She has been modeling since she was 15 years old. She was one of Lillian’s most favorite models and together they created many images that have now become“classics” of the genre.

       THE POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY #567

      “I understood that synergistic dance between photographer and object-“muse” if you will, “model” whatever you call us. It’s that client language of communication, like being psychic with each other.”

      ~ Carmen Dell 'Orefice



       "You know it is a long creative life and if you do the same thing every day it doesn't work. You don't become creative anymore" 

      ~ Lillian Bassman

      Carmen is now 90 years old, still beautiful and still working. She has been modeling since she was 15 years old. She was one of Lillian’s most favorite models and together they created many images that have now become“classics” of the genre.

    • THE POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY #688 “Fashion cannot exist without attention, enthusiasm and passion. Passion for design…Passion for making…And passion to keep fashion alive" ~ Christian Dior Dior’s words also could be used to describe Lillian Bassman herself. I have never met anyone with such passion, energy and enthusiasm. She was just so inspiring to be around. As she told me, “I’ve never not worked. I’m 93 years old and I’ve been working since I was 15!” Talk about work ethic, I miss her.

       THE POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY #688

      “Fashion cannot exist without attention, enthusiasm and passion. Passion for design…Passion for making…And passion to keep fashion alive"

      ~ Christian Dior 

      Dior’s words also could be used to describe Lillian Bassman herself. I have never met anyone with such passion, energy and enthusiasm. She was just so inspiring to be around. As she told me, “I’ve never not worked. I’m 93 years old and I’ve been working since I was 15!”

      Talk about work ethic, I miss her.

  • Career & Early life

     

    When Avedon went off to photograph fashion collections in Paris in 1947, he lent Bassman his studio and an assistant. She continued her self-education and in short order landed an important account with a lingerie company. In its last issue, in May 1948, Junior Bazaar ran a seven-page portfolio of wedding photographs she had taken, titled “Happily Ever After.”

     

    Ms. Bassman became highly sought after for her expressive portraits of slender, long-necked models advertising lingerie, cosmetics and fabrics. Her lingerie work in particular brought lightness and glamour to an arena previously known for heavy, middle-aged women posing in industrial-strength corsets.

     

    “I had a terrific commercial life,” Ms. Bassman told The New York Times in 1997. “I did everything that could be photographed: children, food, liquor, cigarettes, lingerie, beauty products.”

    • Lillian Bassman Next to Nothing. Model Unknown, New York. Junior Bazaar, 1948 Gelatin silver print 14 x 11 inches. Signed & numbered in pencil on verso Edition 10 of 25
      Lillian Bassman
      Next to Nothing. Model Unknown, New York. Junior Bazaar, 1948
      Gelatin silver print
      14 x 11 inches. Signed & numbered in pencil on verso
      Edition 10 of 25
    • Lillian Bassman Dinner at Nine; Barbara Mullen in a Dress by Piguet, Paris, 1949 Gelatin silver print 24 x 20 inches Edition 1 of 25
      Lillian Bassman
      Dinner at Nine; Barbara Mullen in a Dress by Piguet, Paris, 1949
      Gelatin silver print
      24 x 20 inches
      Edition 1 of 25
    • Lillian Bassman The Personal Touch, Evelyn Tripp, 1948, printed later Gelatin silver print Paper 20 x 16 inches; Image 15 1/2 x 14 3/4 inches Edition 11 of 25
      Lillian Bassman
      The Personal Touch, Evelyn Tripp, 1948, printed later
      Gelatin silver print
      Paper 20 x 16 inches; Image 15 1/2 x 14 3/4 inches
      Edition 11 of 25
    • Lillian Bassman In This Year of Lace, Dovima in a dress by Jane Derby at the Plaza Hotel, New York, Harper's Bazaar, 1951 Gelatin silver print 24 x 20 inches Edition 4 of 25
      Lillian Bassman
      In This Year of Lace, Dovima in a dress by Jane Derby at the Plaza Hotel, New York, Harper's Bazaar, 1951
      Gelatin silver print
      24 x 20 inches
      Edition 4 of 25
  • Lillian Violet Bassman was born on June 15, 1917, in Brooklyn and grew up in the Bronx. Her parents, Jewish émigrés from Russia, allowed her a bohemian style of life, even letting her move in, at 15, with the man she would later marry, the documentary photographer Paul Himmel.

    Ms. Bassman studied fabric design at Textile High School, a vocational school in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. After modeling for artists employed by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project and working as a muralist’s assistant, she took a night course in fashion illustration at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. 

     

    She soon showed her work to Brodovitch, who was impressed. Waiving tuition, he accepted her into his Design Laboratory at the New School for Social Research, where she changed her emphasis from fashion illustration to graphic design.Brodovitch took her on as his unpaid apprentice at Harper’s Bazaar in 1941, but desperate to earn money she left to become an assistant to the art director at Elizabeth Arden, whereupon Brodovitch anointed her his first paid assistant. Like her mentor, she was artistically daring. At Junior Bazaar, she experimented with abandon, treating fashion in a bold, graphic style and floating images in space.

    “One week we decided that we were going to do all green vegetables, so we had the designers make all green clothing, green lipstick, green hair, green everything,” she told Print magazine in 2006.

     

    Her nonadvertising work appeared frequently in Harper’s Bazaar, and she developed close relationships with a long list of the era’s top models, including Barbara Mullen (her muse), Dovima and Suzy Parker. The stylistic changes of the 1960s, however, left her cold. The models, too. “I got sick of them,” she told The Times in 2009. “They were becoming superstars. They were not my kind of models. They were dictating rather than taking direction.”

    In 1969, disappointed with the photographic profession and her prospects, she destroyed most of her commercial negatives. She put more than 100 editorial negatives in trash bags, putting them aside in her converted carriage house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She soon forgot all about them.

  • Selected later works
    Lillian Bassman, Dress By Thierry Mugler, 1998 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Lillian Bassman, Jean Shrimpton, 1955 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Lillian Bassman, Night Bloom, Anneliese Seubert, Ball Gown by John Galliano for Haute Couture Givenchy, Paris, New York Times Magazine,... (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Lillian Bassman, Mesh Cap, California, 1961 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Lillian Bassman, It's A Cinch, Carmen, New York, Harper's Bazaar, 1951 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Lillian Bassman  1917-2012Wonders of Water: Model Unknown, New York, Harper's Bazaar, 1959  Signed in ink and editioned in pencil on label affixed to print verso  Gelatin silver print  Paper 40 x 31 1/2 inches; Image 35 x 26 1/2 inches  Edition 17 of 25 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Lillian Bassman, Wonders of Water (Variant): ModelUnknown, New York, 1959 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Lillian Bassman, Kronung Des Chic, Jada, dress byThierry Mugler, 1998
  • RE-INTERPRETATIONS

     

    By the mid-1970s, she was out of the fashion world entirely and had begun focusing on her own work, taking large-format Cibachrome photographs of glistening fruits, vegetables and flowers, pictures of cracks in the city streets and distorted male torsos based on photographs in bodybuilding magazines. It was not until the early 1990s that Martin Harrison, a fashion curator and historian who was staying at her house, found the long-forgotten negatives. He encouraged her to revisit them. Ms. Bassman took a fresh look at the earlier work. She began reprinting the negatives, applying some of the bleaching techniques and other toning agents with which she had first experimented in the 1940s, creating more abstract, mysterious prints.

     

    “In looking at them I got a little intrigued, and I took them into the darkroom, and I started to do my own thing on them,” she told The Times. “I was able to make my own choices, other than what Brodovitch or the editors had made.”

     

    Her reinterpretations, as she called them, found a new generation of admirers. A full-fledged revival of her career ensued, with gallery shows and international exhibitions, including a joint retrospective at the Deichtorhallen museum in Hamburg with her husband and a series of monographs devoted to her photography. A one-woman show at the Hamiltons Gallery in London, organized by Mr. Harrison in 1993, was followed by exhibitions at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris and an assignment from The New York Times Magazine to cover the haute couture collections in Paris in 1996. She completed her last fashion assignment for German Vogue in 2004.

     

    Mr. Himmel died in 2009, having abandoned photography in his late 50s to become a psychiatric caregiver in the city’s hospitals and later a psychotherapist in private practice. Besides her son, the editor in chief of Abrams Books, she is survived by a daughter, Liza Himmel, known as Lizzie; two grandchildren; and a step-grandchild.

    Ms. Bassman’s work has been published in “Lillian Bassman” (1997) and “Lillian Bassman: Women” (2009). A new book, “Lillian Bassman: Lingerie,” is to be published by Abrams on April 1. 

     

    (via Lillian Bassman's obituary "Lillian Bassman, Fashion and Fine-Art Photographer, Dies at 94." Written by William Grimes for The New York Times. Published February 13th, 2012.)

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