This is “The Overlook,” a column by Sarah Cascone about the lives and work of artists who have been passed over, excluded from, or otherwise left out of the mainstream art world.
When Lillian Bassman was 74, she found a garbage bag full of negatives of fashion photographs she had taken during her 27 years at Harper’s Bazaar. The year was 1991. Her tenant, the celebrated painter Helen Frankenthaler, was moving out of the ground floor studio of Bassman’s East 83rd Street carriage house, and had happened upon the bag, waterlogged and moldy after two decades lying forgotten in the building’s old coal room.
Encouraged by a friend who was visiting, fashion curator and historian Martin Harrison, Bassman began developing new prints from the few salvageable negatives. It was the beginning of a third act for the artist, who worked first as a graphic designer and art director before taking up the camera herself.
Bassman called her new works “reinterpretations,” manipulating the images to render them more abstract and mysterious than her original editorial output—which was already highly experimental. Her shots often featured bold silhouettes that could verge on abstraction, a dreamlike haziness, and dramatic highlights and shadows.
It was this late work that finally brought Bassman, who was born in 1917, to the attention of the art world. She enjoyed a slew of gallery shows in the years before her death in 2012, and even took up Photoshop at age 87 to achieve the kinds of ethereal effects she had once gotten using cotton balls, tissues, brushes, ferrocyanide bleach, and even cigarette smoke.
Bassman’s avant-garde sensibility is on full display at the Met in “Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond,” an exhibition made possible thanks to a generous donation of her work from her children, Lizzie and Eric Himmel. The artist is also the subject of a two-person gallery show, alongside Vogue photographer Sheila Metzner, at Paris’s La Galerie Rouge, creating a transatlantic moment spotlighting a truly groundbreaking career for a woman of her era.
“Her story of not only arriving at [Bazaar], but getting a foot in the door in the art world more generally, does reflect a great deal of gumption,” Virginia McBride, the Met’s assistant curator of photography, tells CULTURED. “She was kind of an unprecedented success.”
Born in the Bronx and raised in Brooklyn and Greenwich Village, Bassman originally planned to become a dancer. Though an injury forced her to change paths, she later described her photography work as dancing barefoot with the camera, showing her models how to move, and creating a sense of motion in the printed image.
She was always drawn to art—as teenagers, Bassman and her husband, photographer Paul Himmel, spent hours wandering the halls of the Met, drinking it all in. (Their 77-year romance began when they moved in together at just 15 and 18, respectively, and continued until his death in 2009.)
Bassman’s first job, as a nude artist model at New York’s Art Students League, paid just 50 cents an hour. She continued modeling for the Works Progress Administration, and became determined to make it as an artist.
On the strength of her fashion illustrations, Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch awarded Bassman a scholarship to his course at the New School for Social Research. In 1940, when she was 24, he offered her an unpaid internship at the magazine. She would become his right-hand woman, working as his co-director at the magazine’s sister publication, Junior Bazaar. But first, she briefly left for a paying job at Elizabeth Arden, much to the chagrin of Brodovitch, who begged her to come back.
Lillian Bassman, Harper’s Bazaar cover maquette, 1949.
“I said, ‘I’d love to work for Harper’s Bazaar, Mr. Brodovitch, you know, but I have to make a living.’ This went on for months,” she recalled in an oral history interview with the Smithsonian Institution‘s Archives of American Art (AAA) in 2011. “Finally, he called up and said, ‘All right, I’ve gotten you a salary.'”
Bassman helped foster the careers of then-emerging photographers including Robert Frank and Richard Avedon by giving them early assignments at Junior Bazaar. In return, Avedon, who became a close friend, encouraged her to learn photography. When he spent the summer of 1947 in Paris, he lent Bassman his darkroom and assistant to practice. The next year, Junior Bazaar folded, and Brodovitch encouraged Bassman to shift her focus from graphic design to the lens.
“I had a feeling that there was something in me that had to be said with the camera,” Bassman told PBS in 1994.
Bassman’s photographic specialty became lingerie—but her real gift was highlighting and celebrating feminine beauty. As a woman in a male-dominated field, she had a way of setting her models at ease that translated into the finished shot.
She became known for taking on tricky assignments, like an elongated, asymmetrical black Christian Dior “pirate” hat. The headpiece became impossibly chic in Bassman’s 1949 photo The Day-Length Dinner Dress, shot during her first photography assignment in Paris. It’s on view at the Met alongside the hat, which was already in the Costume Institute’s collection.
“Seeing them together really testifies to Bassman’s ingenuity. The hat is this remarkable sculptural headpiece,” McBride says. “It’s the type of accessory that not everyone could pull off, and might have presented a challenge to a lesser photographer.”
Bassman also bucked the traditional expectations of fashion photography—like, say, putting the clothes in focus. Her risk-taking in the darkroom imbued her work with an impressionistic mood, an undeniable elegance, and a Modernism that defied the industry’s commercial standards. Sometimes, her photographs could almost be mistaken for drawings.
Her desire to push the limit wasn’t always appreciated. Brodovitch once returned two of her particularly edgy prints, the high-contrast The Yellow Smock Coat and >Yellow Linen Etched in Black, with a note that said, “This is dangerous.” Both are on view at the Met.
“She was able to carve out a place in the industry where she could exert all this freedom and exercise this experimental impulse, devise all of these totally novel darkroom techniques that previously would never have found traction in the world of fashion photography,” McBride says. “Through sheer force of will, charisma, and creative vision, she helped make a place for those types of pictures and encourage change from within at this very esteemed publication.”
By 1970, as fashion photography became increasingly commercialized, Bassman felt creatively stifled and left the field. She kept taking her own photographs and briefly ran a clothing line under her name, but she threw out most of her negatives when clearing out her studio to rent to Frankenthaler. What survived sparked a personal artistic renaissance—and helped secure her legacy as an artist.
When Bassman revisited her fashion photography late in life, it was free from the oversight and input of other creative voices at Harper’s Bazaar. And the response was beyond what she ever expected.
There were new assignments for publications like the New York Times Magazine and Vogue Deutsch. Art galleries took notice, starting with a 1993 show curated by Harrison at London’s Hamiltons Gallery. (The estate is now represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York.) Bassman was the subject of several books, and a joint exhibition with Himmel at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg’s Haus der Photographie the year he died.
“I never felt accepted as a fashion photographer as I do now as a photographer,” Bassman told the AAA. “I feel much more accepted now. You got to be 94.”
“Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 26.
“C’est Chic! Sheila Metzner and Lillian Bassman” is on view at La Galerie Rouge through Sept. 19.
in your life?
