May 2012Lillian Bassman made fashion photographs — such as this image, on view at Peter Fetterman Gallery, in Santa Monica — with an abstracted, painterly quality. Top: Bare Trap, Barbara Curly, bra and slip by Warner’s, 1955, from Lillian Bassman: Lingerie (courtesy of Abrams, 2012). All images © Lillian Bassman
When celebrated photographer Lillian Bassman died on February 13, it came as something of a shock to her family. Yes, she was an enviable 94 years old, but she was a spitfire to the end. “Literally, she was on her computer five days before,” recalls her daughter, Lizzie Himmel. With the New York winter so mild — Bassman brushed off suggestions of wintering somewhere warm like the South of France or, heaven forbid, Florida — Lizzie had hoped she’d make it through to another summer, when she would return to Fire Island. “She was brilliant last summer. She gardened.”
“Of course I miss her,” continues Lizzie, who is also a photographer, “but I think she rocked out. Her last picture was brilliant.”
Something of a character like her mother, Lizzie giddily jumps up from her chair in the second-floor sitting room of the carriage house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side where Bassman lived for 55 years and returns with the photograph. (In her later years, Bassman reworked shots from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, either in the darkroom or digitally, to create brand-new images.) The subject’s outstretched arms hold a wide striped towel, printed in black-and-white and appearing to glow. A gray outline emphasizes the model’s gentle curves, including her small but womanly stomach.
Bassman’s Wonders of Water, 1959, first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, and is now at Staley-Wise Gallery.
The photo — along with the experimental approach that created it — is indicative of Bassman’s long, illustrious career. A child of Russian-Jewish immigrants, she had a profound impact on fashion photography, bringing an elegance to it with her richly contrasted silver-gelatin prints, but also imbuing it with a degree of abstraction and a painterly quality previously unseen.
Some of her most groundbreaking and resonant work is now on view in “Lillian Bassman, A Life: 1917-2012,” through June 9 at Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica, California. In images there, the tiers on a dress echo like rippling water, a woman’s neck and arm stretch with an artful grace, the netting on a Chanel hat appears as delicate as pointillist marks on canvas. Lillian Bassman: Lingerie, meanwhile, a selection of her most sensual and intimate lingerie photography, was published this spring by Abrams, where her son, Eric Himmel, is editor in chief. As Eric writes of his mother in Lingerie, “She was an inveterate observer of women and their ways.” (The book is accompanied by an exhibition on view through June 16 at Staley-Wise Gallery, in New York’s Soho.)
Fetterman, who worked with Bassman for close to 20 years, contrasts her to the male greats of her era, such as Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, because of her understanding of the female psyche. “Take away the performance of a model trying to seduce the photographer. In its place is this connection,” Fetterman says. “That’s why the women seem real as opposed to objectified.”
Bassman and her husband, Paul Himmel, captured by Richard Avedon, with whom they were vacationing in Europe.
In an era when men dominated the field of fashion photography, Bassman was an original, proud of it and much in demand for editorial and advertising jobs. “The work was highly feminine. It was so much about romance,” says dealer Etheleen Staley, another longtime colleague. “It was a time when men sent flowers, and you didn’t just jump into bed with someone.”
Bassman was also one half of a couple well known in the fashion and photography worlds. She was married for 73 years to Paul Himmel, a noted photographer turned psychotherapist who died in 2009. Their marriage was the kind of love affair Hollywood used to make movies about. “They never did anything apart,” Lizzie says. “My mother never went out to dinner without him. She never had close girlfriends. They finished each other’s sentences. They finished each other’s thoughts.”
They met when she was six and he, nine, on Coney Island, where Paul’s father had opened the area’s first vegetarian restaurant. Several years later, Paul dated Lillian’s older sister, Sunny, for a “nanosecond,” Lizzie says, before falling for Bassman. “My mother always said Sunny was a classic beauty. She turned heads.” As for Bassman’s own feminine mystique, Lizzie goes on, “My mother was a good flirt — an excellent flirt. At 94, she still could flirt.”
In an era when men dominated the field of fashion photography, Bassman was an original and proud of it.
Clockwise from top left: A young Bassman (left) with her mother, Clara, and her older sister, Sophie, affectionately known as Sunny; Bassman and Himmel on a Mexico vacation in the 1940s; Bassman modeling for an art class organized by Lenny Bocour, the founder of Bocour Artist Colors paint company, New York, 1935
When she was 15, Bassman’s parents, who were bohemian, political and intellectual but not religious, let her move in with Paul. The two married a couple of years later, primarily, Lizzie says, so that Paul wouldn’t lose his teaching job by living out of wedlock with a minor. Bassman and Paul’s passion seemed to rub off on their own parents: Her mother and his father scandalously left their respective spouses for each other.
In the 1930s, Bassman worked as a nude model for the Art Students League “because she didn’t want to babysit,” Lizzie says, and she also frequently posed nude for Paul. “She still had that figure when she died,” Lizzie remarks, pointing to a full-length portrait that shows off Bassman’s wasp waist. She was sexy, or at least sexual, in the smart, handsome mold of Katharine Hepburn or Lauren Bacall. “My mother was a bit of a madcap.”
Bassman yearned to be a painter, but after Alexey Brodovitch accepted her into his class at the New School, graphic design became her true love. Brodovitch, the famed Russian-émigré designer best known for his art direction of Harper’s Bazaar in its aesthetic heyday, took a shine to Bassman and made her his assistant. In 1945, she became art director of Junior Bazaar. “She was a really controlling person, and she had a clear vision,” Lizzie says. “She would art direct Dick Avedon.”
Bassman with her children, Eric and Lizzie Himmel, in the 1950s, New York.
But art direction also proved frustrating. “She would have an idea for a story, and it never came out the way she wanted,” Lizzie says. Finally, Brodovitch told her that if she wasn’t satisfied, she should try a photo shoot herself. “It’s not like she never messed around with photography before,” says Lizzie. “She did her whole life.”
Within a year, she abandoned graphic design for photography full time. Bassman leaned toward the abstract. “I think that’s why the younger generation is so interested in her,” Lizzie says. She was also a lifelong experimenter and a whiz in the darkroom. For one coat story circa 1950, Bassman spent two hours tracing the figure’s outline with light through a pinhole in a board — effectively painting with light — then bleached out the gray areas. Brodovitch’s succinct, handwritten appraisal read, “These are very dangerous.” Fetterman describes Bassman’s images as “very dramatic, almost surrealist. She wanted to create the mood of chalk drawings.” Bassman and Paul waited longer than most of their generation to have children. Bassman, her daughter says, worried that motherhood would put a roadblock in her career. But despite being a workaholic, she never worked weekends. “That had to do with my father,” Lizzie says. “That was their time together.”
The Well-Spent Dollar, Pud, bra by Maidenform, 1956, on view through June 16 at Staley-Wise’s exhibition of works from Lillian Bassman: Lingerie by Lillian Bassman. Courtesy of Abrams
Harper’s Bazaar published It’s a Cinch, Carmen, Merry Widow by Warner’s in September, 1951. Courtesy of Abrams
Much of that time was spent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, their visual temple just a few blocks from where they lived. Paul also loved flea markets, and Bassman would accompany him dutifully. In the summers, Lizzie and Eric would go off to sleepaway camp. “Mother used to say, ‘Your father couldn’t wait to send you to camp so we could have sex in the house on Fire Island,’ ” Lizzie says with a laugh, noting that the house is on the small side and far from soundproof.
Lizzie and her mother bonded over art. “I loved Pollock, and my mother loved it. My father thought it was crap,” she recalls. “Installation work left him cold, whereas my mother and I could look at a piece of string and go, ‘Ahhh.’ ”
The marriage was not problem-free. In the late ’60s, Paul was drinking too much, and Bassman’s ultimatum forced him into rehab. When he returned from what Lizzie calls “chitchat,” he abandoned photography for psychotherapy.
While Paul — who was also of the Brodovitch school and had shown in the famed 1955 “Family of Man” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art — had shot fashion only to earn the paycheck, Bassman genuinely loved it. She was an early fashionista herself, even designing her own line for a couple of years, and she thrived on the collaboration endemic to fashion editorial. “She loved the shoots,” Lizzie says. “Nothing made her happier than spending the day with Carmen [Dell’Orefice, the eternally beautiful model].”
Barbara Mullen Aboard Le Bateau Mouche, Paris, 1960, was part of an advertising campaign Bassman did for Chanel.
But as the ladylike New Look of the ’50s and hippie peasant blouses of the ’60s gave way to the groovy ’70s, she tired of it. Editors were increasingly in search of the next hot photographer, and Bassman simply hated the clothes, as well as the trend toward ever-younger models. “She had a really specific taste about clothing,” Lizzie says. “She couldn’t get her head around ’70s and ’80s fashion. She found everything completely ugly.”
Though it has become a part of fashion lore that Bassman said sayonara to her fashion career by tossing her negatives in trash bags intended for the dump and that they were later “rediscovered,” Lizzie insists the tale is largely apocryphal. “Dad burned all his stuff. He burned all his fashion stuff and saved what he wanted to save,” she says. “Mom boxed it in cardboard boxes, badly. They didn’t know about archiving. A lot of it got destroyed, but she didn’t throw it out. She didn’t hate the work the way my dad did.” Still, she turned her attention primarily to her own art photography, shooting still lifes and muscle men, among other subjects. The relationship of Bassman’s fashion pictures to abstraction was emphasized in gallery exhibitions such as KMR Arts’ 2009 “Cracks and Lingerie,” which teamed her wonderful photos of cracks in the sidewalk with those of long-necked women in corsets and other risqué underthings. The lines in both sets of images — sometimes meandering, sometimes geometric — connected the two bodies of work. In later years, Bassman also proved a quick study with Photoshop. “She was awesome. That’s her computer,” Lizzie says, pointing to a monitor that sits dark. “Nobody touches her computer. She would sit on the computer for eight or nine hours a day. The same way she was in a darkroom, she was on the computer.”
Bassman, vacationing in Puerto Rico in the 1960s, photographed by her husband.
Though Bassman and Paul were both noted photographers, Lizzie says her parents did not have a direct artistic influence on each other. “They grew up together,” she says. “They lived at the Met together. Their daily life together influenced each other.”
Bassman could be a bit of a nudge, however. “My mother would get in his face sometimes, ‘Why don’t you crop it this way?’ I can hear my father’s voice saying, ‘Lillian, go to your own pictures.’ Nobody played in each other’s darkrooms. You didn’t mess with each other’s stuff.” Paul, however, did choose Bassman’s assistants for her and taught her how to load film.
“She could do anything with lighting but couldn’t load a roll of film,” Lizzie says. Perhaps most importantly, they shared an all-encompassing worldview: “They didn’t think life was worth living unless they could get stuff done.”
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