DA NYTIMES MAGAZINE
Portaits of a Lady Baron Adolph de Meyer
Culture, Travel By JORDAN HRUSKA
At the turn of the century, magazine and catalog illustrations of the latest fashion collections were rather dry, using models who acted more like cutout dolls. It took the work of Baron Adolph de Meyer to loosen up fashion editorial with challenging portraits in the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. A rare showing of more than 100 of his society portraits, commercial fashion photography and still lifes recently opened at Robert Miller Gallery (through April 3; robertmillergallery.com).
De Meyer’s beginnings in photography coincided with those of the various Photo-Secession movements in New York, London and Vienna, which all fought hard for photography’s place in the realm of fine art. His early portraits of Edwardian London society and still lifes possessed a luminosity that reflected Symbolist ideals, which sought to transcend reality.
As the first staff photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, de Meyer photographed some of the most powerful society women. Emerging from a constrained Victorian era, these women, with great aplomb, would assert their status in theatrical manners: one de Meyer muse would often drift down Venice’s Grand Canal with a leopard in her lap. A vintage print of Mrs. W.R. Vanderbilt taken in 1919 on view shows her in a prim yet urgent World War I volunteer uniform, while another impressionistic portrait of the actress Betty Lee from 1918 has her dressed in a jet-black frock, bending slightly forward, with a feather plume of her hat and what look to be trails of smoke hanging in the air.
De Meyer delighted in highlighting sinuous forms and in exposing obtuse body angles — both speaking to elements of nascent sexuality and sensual transfiguration. Such poses weren’t only reserved for women. Also on view is an image the photographer took of the Ballets Russes performer Vaslav Nijinksy actively lusting in dance for a nymph.
Like all things fashionable, de Meyer’s work fell out of vogue with the onset of Modernist aesthetics, despite his attempts to employ them. His name remained legendary, however, and his work can be thought of as informing the styles of his contemporaries Man Ray and Cecil Beaton. For vanguard publications like Vogue, he not only made portraits but helped these publications become portraits of an age.
Culture, Travel By JORDAN HRUSKA
At the turn of the century, magazine and catalog illustrations of the latest fashion collections were rather dry, using models who acted more like cutout dolls. It took the work of Baron Adolph de Meyer to loosen up fashion editorial with challenging portraits in the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. A rare showing of more than 100 of his society portraits, commercial fashion photography and still lifes recently opened at Robert Miller Gallery (through April 3; robertmillergallery.com).
De Meyer’s beginnings in photography coincided with those of the various Photo-Secession movements in New York, London and Vienna, which all fought hard for photography’s place in the realm of fine art. His early portraits of Edwardian London society and still lifes possessed a luminosity that reflected Symbolist ideals, which sought to transcend reality.
As the first staff photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, de Meyer photographed some of the most powerful society women. Emerging from a constrained Victorian era, these women, with great aplomb, would assert their status in theatrical manners: one de Meyer muse would often drift down Venice’s Grand Canal with a leopard in her lap. A vintage print of Mrs. W.R. Vanderbilt taken in 1919 on view shows her in a prim yet urgent World War I volunteer uniform, while another impressionistic portrait of the actress Betty Lee from 1918 has her dressed in a jet-black frock, bending slightly forward, with a feather plume of her hat and what look to be trails of smoke hanging in the air.
De Meyer delighted in highlighting sinuous forms and in exposing obtuse body angles — both speaking to elements of nascent sexuality and sensual transfiguration. Such poses weren’t only reserved for women. Also on view is an image the photographer took of the Ballets Russes performer Vaslav Nijinksy actively lusting in dance for a nymph.
Like all things fashionable, de Meyer’s work fell out of vogue with the onset of Modernist aesthetics, despite his attempts to employ them. His name remained legendary, however, and his work can be thought of as informing the styles of his contemporaries Man Ray and Cecil Beaton. For vanguard publications like Vogue, he not only made portraits but helped these publications become portraits of an age.
