It Was an Ad? It’s Still Art
High above Los Angeles, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the bastard stepchild of the fine art world is finally getting its birthright. “Icons of Style: A Century of Fashion Photography, 1911-2011” may be the most sweeping such survey in decades, featuring 198 works (pictures, magazine covers, ad campaigns).
Richard Avedon’s “Dovima With Elephants,” the 1955 print of a Dior evening gown amid the pachyderms, which became the most expensive fashion photograph sold at auction when it went for over $1 million at Christie’s in 2010? It’s in there. Erwin Blumenfeld’s pho- to of Lisa Fonssagrives in a Lucien Lelong dress hanging off the side of the Eiffel Tower, the poster on many a dorm room wall? That, too. Same for Bruce Weber’s 1982 Calvin Klein underwear ad featuring a briefs- clad Tom Hintnaus silhouetted against a white structure in the shape of a phallus. It once stopped traffic in Times Square.
Still, the show is not comprehensive: It is focused on work made in the four traditional fashion capitals: New York, Paris, London and Milan. And it ends in 2011, when Instagram and Snapchat changed photographers into “image-makers,” said Paul Martineau, a curator at the Getty Museum, who organized the exhibition.
The show is a reminder that despite the growing prominence of both photography and fashion, when it comes to the hallowed halls of a museum, there’s still the question of whether they belong.
“Photography had to fight to get taken seriously, and fashion photography had to fight even harder,” said Nick Knight, founder of the fashion film website SHOWStudio, who has three works here.
These were pictures that most often first appeared in magazines. They represented the opposite of the eternal, a value theoretically at the heart of the art world.
Though there is little doubt that names like Avedon, Penn and Newton have transcended their roots, what this exhibition posits is that there were no roots needed to transcend. By taking the pictures off the page and hanging them on the wall, Mr. Martineau frees them from subconscious associations most of us have with the idea of fashion magazines and ad campaigns.
Mr. Martineau allows us to experience the power in placing a woman in a suit and heels amid the rubble of the London bombing, the way Cecil Beaton did in 1941; or the way the distortion in a picture shot from below, by Neal Barr, reflects the revolution in mores during the 1960s.
But it is the less recognizable photographs that are often the most compelling.
Witness a Bonwit Teller ad by Anton Bruehl from 1932 made to display “knitted-to- order sport clothes”: It depicts a female form in what looks like a body stocking, her head shadowed in an upraised arm, her silhouette resembling Greek statuary.
And there is Louise Dahl-Wolfe’s 1945 photo of a model in a Claire McCardell bathing suit reclining on the sand, her head veiled with a scarf. Swimsuit? What swimsuit? It fades into the background in a feint of perspective.
“The composition just calls out to you,” Mr. Martineau said. “It says: ‘Come near me. Examine me.’ ” And, he might have added: Give me the respect I deserve.