Lillian Bassman & Paul Himmel Retrospective at The Deichtorhallen Hamburg

Written by Leonard Gross Thursday, 26 August 2010 23:16

HAMBURG.- Deichtorhallen Hamburg presents the first comprehensive exhibition in Europe by Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel. Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel count among the masters of photography. The House of Photography of Deichtorhallen Hamburg prepares the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist couple. Besides the well-known photographs, published in “Vogue” and “Harper’s Bazaar”, yet unpublished photographs of the two artists will be exposed. On view through 21 February, 2010.

Today Lillian Bassman belongs to the last great woman photographers in the fashion world. In the 1940s and 1960s she worked as an art director for “Junior Bazaar” and later for “Harper’s Bazaar”, and promoted photographers, such as Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, Louis Faurer and Arnold Newman.

Paul Himmel (born 1914 as son of Ukrainian pilgrims; died in Feb. 2009 in New York) was one of the last great living photographers from the early era of American photography. He gained fame through his early exhibition “The Familiy of Man”, curated by Edward Steichen, which then turned around the world. In the mid-thirties, Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel got married. Contrary to his wife, Paul Himmel increasingly lost interest in fashion photography. He began to develop his own projects, most of them radical experiments.

Fashion photographer Lillian Bassman, protégée of Harper’s Bazaar designer Alexey Brodovitch and friend to Richard Avedon, rose to prominence in the 1940s and ’50s but drifted out of the business, threw out her negatives and fell into relative obscurity for decades — until Helen Frankenthaler, who happened to be renting her onetime studio, came across a cache of lost negatives in 1991. A monograph followed, a flush of prestigious assignments and a handful of exhibitions, launching her career once more at about age 80.

The Deichtorhallen is one of the best known exhibition institutions worldwide. The historical buildings are divided into an exhibition hall for contemporary art and the „House of Photography.“ Together the two buildings organize a highly diverse program of changing exhibitions.

What were once two market halls, today provide some 6,000 square meters of exhibition area forming one of Europe’s largest centers for art exhibitions. „...Anyone who hates that museum feel will love the old halls; no sense of claustrophobia here, a modern ambience, and the shows are always exciting,“ is how the magazine „MarieClaire“ describes the Deichtorhallen. The editors of the annual CAPITAL-Kunstkompass art guide rank the Deichtorhallen among their group of only ten internationally important museums and art institutions alongside the likes of the Guggenheim and MOMA, New York, the Stedelijk, Amsterdam, the Tate Modern, London and the Center Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Visit The Deichtorhallen at : http://www.deichtorhallen.de/

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~