Horst: Patterns from Nature

by Martin Barnes

Horst P. Horst (1906-1999) was one of the twentieth century’s master photographers. A revered figure in the world of fashion image making, he charted sixty years of style for Vogue and House and Garden , from the fashions and celebrities of the 1930s to the interiors of the 1980s. However, little-known within his body of work – and contrasting intriguingly with his career in fashion – is a set of prints and a book, Patterns from Nature (1946). Working with a Rolleiflex and Graphic View Camera in New York, Monterey and Mexico, Horst photographed the detailed textures and forms of natural objects, including plants, rocks, shells and butterfly wings. His close scrutiny of these forms makes them unfamiliar and revelatory. These images were gathered into Patterns from Nature , which also featured 9 kaleidoscopic images made by arranging the photographs in simple repeat. Horst believed that these dynamic patterns would be ‘immediately applicable to industrial fields such as textiles, wallpaper, carpets, plastics and glass’. Published to coincide with a major retrospective on Horst’s work at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Martin Barnes re-examines these images in, Patterns from Nature . This new edition will make the 9 original collaged images available for the first time in nearly 70 years and will also include a further 28 photo-collages that have only recently been rediscovered and have never before been seen or published.

104 pages, Hardcover

First published October 7, 2014

Reviews

[Henry Berry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horst is—there is no other—of course Horst P. Horst (1906-99), the famed fashion photographer. Born in Germany, Horst is not his birth name. He lived a glamorous life through mid and latter 20th century shaped partly by the rise of Nazism in Germany, the allure of Paris, the sanctuary of London, the magnet of New York City. But as talented and adaptable as he was and with his self-evident promise and the favorable impressions he made on varied influential persons as he moved among these international arts and cultural centers, Horst would have been a success and left an imprint in any era. Harry Truman and wife Bess, Coco Chanel, and Diana Vreeland befriended him; and he memorably photographed Bette Davis, Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Yves St. Laurent, Cy Twombly, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, among many other individuals at the top of the worlds of fashion, art, and public interest. Horst's immersion in this world and ease of movement through it is reflected in his comment regarding Coco Chanel that she was "queen of the whole thing."

The 37 photographs of this book are not ones relating to Horst's typical, characteristic subjects of fashion, high society, celebrities, and interior design intoning fabulous, glamorous, rich circles. Unless they were identified as Horst photographs, most would not realize they were. Nonetheless, they represent a central, innate, lifelong preoccupation of Horst despite at first seeming uncharacteristic, apparently experimental or whimsical. Or early, before his recognizable interests and style emerged. But these photographs of close-ups of natural subjects were taken in the 1940s. Introductory essays by Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, explain these Horst photographs as a desire by Horst to connect with the Germanic strain of romanticism, realism, and philosophy as seen with Goethe and Hegel, for example, to a practical impulse denoted by Horst himself in his "Preface" to the original book where he writes, "The resulting patterns are immediately applicable to industrial fields such as textiles, wallpaper, carpets, plastics, glass, ceramics, china, leather, book-binding, and jewelry." Following this quote, Barnes relates, "For Horst, these patterns acted as a pleasing link between his interests in photography, fashion, design, and interiors." With today's ideas about branding in mind, one wonders if Horst didn't conceive the photographs of patterns from nature as a basis and to some extent promotion for his own "line" of products at some time.