She was barely five feet tall and wore her hair pulled back in a bun or short ponytail, or a little of both. She tended to wear Keds (usually red), was raised by bohemian immigrant parents in Greenwich Village, and at 24 became an acolyte and, later, a colleague of the mercurial Alexey Brodovitch. She worked under Carmel Snow at Harper’s Bazaar, gave Richard Avedon his first magazine cover when she was art director at Junior Bazaar (they also became close friends), and mixed with fellow up-and-comers such as Irving Penn and George Hoyningen-Huene. One of the most innovative fashion photographers in postwar America, she began a second career at the age of 75 when, in 1992, a long-forgotten bag of her negatives turned up and took her back into the darkroom to create yet more dazzling photographs, what she called “reinterpretations.”
The exhibition “Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond,” which opened this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, places museum-goers in an immersive surround of 65 rare vintage prints from the 1940s to the 1960s, plus some late-1990s works. Additionally, there are maquettes, contact prints, collages, and magazines, all of which illustrate “Bassman’s trajectory from the world of art director to photographer,” says the Met’s assistant curator in the Department of Photographs, Virginia McBride, who organized the show. The sum of this remarkable bounty is a gift from Bassman’s children, Eric and Lizzie Himmel.
