Titled Glamour and the Avant-Garde – and on display until May 2025 – the exhibit features hundreds of images that shaped the Classical and Surrealist aesthetics of the 1920s and 30s, changing fashion photography forever.
MILAN, ITALY – Oftentimes it’s the simple things that make for compelling craft. Such an example can be attributed to George Hoyningen-Huene’s photographic practice, on view at Milan’s Palazzo Reale to celebrate one of the pioneers of fashion photography 125 years after his birth.
Curated by Susanna Brown, curator of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the exhibit – a first in Italy – consists of hundreds of photographs distributed in ten sections, starring platinum prints that display the photographer’s poised and powerful monochrome style, as well as a section that highlight his use of printing techniques and the cultural references that tinged his works.
Philippe Halsman George Hoyningen-Huene photographing Rita Hayworth 1943 © George Hoyningen-Huene Estate Archives
The exhibition thematically traces the career of George Hoyningen-Huene (St. Petersburg 1900 – Los Angeles 1968), the son of an American woman and an Estonian baron, who after the October Revolution left Russia and fled with his family to London before moving to Paris in 1920. At the time, he joined the inner circle of Man Ray, with whom he actively collaborated, and frequented surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí, Lee Miller, Pablo Picasso, Paul Éluard and Jean Cocteau.
Erna Carise 1930 © George Hoyningen-Huene Estate Archives
Maggy Rouff 1939 © George Hoyningen-Huene Estate Archives
Described by Richard Avedon as “a genius, the master of us all” thanks to his portraits and photographic compositions which had severity and a certain level of wit to them. Among the most surprising of the twentieth century, George Hoyningen-Huene was among the first in the 1920s and 1930s to capture the style of haute couture houses in Paris, including Chanel, Balenciaga, Schiaparelli and the jeweller Cartier.
In particular, as chief photographer of Vogue France – a position he held from 1926 to 1936 – Hoyningen-Huene established himself as one of the leading authors of the period, creating innovative spirit shoots whose aesthetics were influenced by classical art and Surrealism.
George Hoyningen-Huene: Glamour and the Avant-Garde. Photo: Vincenzo Bruno
George Hoyningen-Huene: Glamour and the Avant-Garde. Photo: Vincenzo Bruno
Full points to the Surrealist section, which features an extraordinary selection of fashion and lifestyle compositions alongside influential features of the past that continue having a resonance in the modern day. Indeed, the Surrealist movement had Hoyningen-Huene look at unusual compositions, the manipulation of reality and suspended and dreamlike atmospheres, turning mere fashion portraits into authentic works of visual art.
An integration recounted in the section THE ESSENCE OF DREAMS: HUENE, CHANEL, AND THE INFLUENCE OF SURREALISM, focusing above all on the collaboration with the two fashion houses, whose contrasting souls were promptly captured by him: on the one hand the artistic and experimental audacity of Schiaparelli, on the other the sober and revolutionary modernity of Chanel.
by Chidozie Obasi