In 1965, New York’s Museum of Modern Art held a summer exhibition titled “Glamour Portraits.” Images in the show presented “mythical women as created by photographers since the 1850s.” It was a first—fashion photography had gained entrée to a museum.
Many big names were in the show: the Victorian giants Adolphe Braun and Julia Margaret Cameron, midcentury phenoms Man Ray and Cecil Beaton, postwar stars Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. And then there was George Hoyningen-Huene, who loomed large among them. When he died three years later, in 1968, he was preparing for his own solo show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, scheduled for and realized in 1970.
Beauty shaped Hoyningen-Huene’s existence. He was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1900, when it was still, he said, “the most aristocratic city in the world.” His father, Baron Barthold Theodor Hermann von Hoyningen-Huene, was a nobleman—chief equerry to Czar Nicholas II. His mother, Anne Lothrop, was the daughter of an American diplomat. Hoyningen-Huene grew up surrounded by horses, carriages, governesses, and gold. Then came the 1917 revolution, and Communists bombed the family estate. The Hoyningen-Huenes fled to the French Riviera.
Young George didn’t stay long in the South of France. He needed work. In the early 1920s, he traveled to Poland, then Belgium. When his sister, Betty, opened a fashion house called Yteb, he moved into her attic on Paris’s Rue Royale and sketched dresses. In 1925, Hoyningen-Huene began designing stage props for Vogue. A year later, he started taking photographs.
The timing was right. The années folles (crazy years) were energizing France, and Hoyningen-Huene’s clean compositions, and a mastery of lighting that lent his subjects a sculptural elegance, won attention. He joined forces with Man Ray to create a portfolio of the most beautiful women in the capital, and at the Ritz Bar enjoyed cigarettes and champagne with Coco Chanel, Jean Cocteau, and Igor Stravinsky. By the 1930s, Hoyningen-Huene was shooting Josephine Baker nude in huge hoop earrings for Vanity Fair. His protégé Horst P. Horst became his partner.
But war was coming and Europe was changing. In 1935, Hoyningen-Huene moved to New York City and worked for Harper’s Bazaar. In 1947, persuaded by the director George Cukor to give Los Angeles a try, he moved there and began creating his stunning portraits of Hollywood stars.
Like many others in that MoMA show of 1965, Hoyningen-Huene had been forgotten, remembered only by those who worked with him. Now, for the first time in 40 years, his photographs are collected in a new book, edited by the writer and curator Susanna Brown, George Hoyningen-Huene: Photography, Fashion, Film. In more than 300 glossy pages, the book chronicles bygone moments of the fabled Jazz Age and Hollywood’s golden age. —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at air mail