Introduction

Dalí/Horst. Crossed gazes 

In the late nineteen thirties, Salvador Dalí and Vogue photographer Horst P. Horst shared locations, friends and mutual confidences. In Paris, they interacted with artists, couturiers, designers, architects and intellectuals who had a decisive impact on their respective careers and inspired them to create their own language. 

The exhibition invites us to explore the gaze of two creative talents who have left an indelible mark on the collective imagination and continue, even today, to influence the worlds of fashion and art. 

On the one hand, the show presents the editorial and artistic projects on which they collaborated over the course of a decade. In these joint initiatives, artist and photographer transform the action of looking into a deliberate and poetic creative act, in which a fascination with the classical heritage often serves as a backdrop. On the other hand, Horst’s portraits and contact prints, together with pieces from Gala and Dalí’s fashion archive, allow us to discover the essential elements that intervene in the staging of the viewer, but also of the viewed. 

Artwork

Horst’s photographic gaze

See

A selection of works allows us to delve deeper into the visual universe of Horst P. Horst, through photographs, editorial projects and materials linked to fashion. The presence of Salvador Dalí is manifested as context, influence and creative complicity, reinforcing a deliberate and poetic conception of the act of looking.

Chronology

Shared contexts and parallel trajectories

See

The chronology places Salvador Dalí and Horst P. Horst in their historical and creative context. The time journey allows us to understand the key moments of their careers, the points of contact and divergences, and how the passage of time, experiences and environments shaped their views.

HORST P. HORST

Horst P. Horst is regarded as one of the great figures of 20th-century fashion photography. Iconic images such as ‘The Mainbocher Corset’ (1939) and the costume designs by Salvador Dalí and Coco Chanel for the ballet Bacchanal (1939), as well as unforgettable portraits of artists, fashion designers, socialites and celebrities of all kinds, are part of the collective imagination and made a decisive and defining contribution to the aesthetics of fashion and photographic portraiture of their time.

Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann was born in 1906 into a prosperous and cultured merchant family in Weissenfels (Germany). He studied architecture in Hamburg until 1930, when his spirit of adventure and deep desire for beauty took him to Paris to work as a junior in Le Corbusier’s studio. The young apprentice found the experience less than stimulating, but it enabled him to expand his circle of friends and spend hours exploring the city’s museums and art galleries. He met Baron George Hoyningen-Huene, Vogue’s star photographer at the time, who became his mentor and opened the doors to the French capital’s vibrant creative and intellectual scene. Thanks to Hoyningen-Huene, Horst discovered his true vocation and took control of his destiny to become one of the most emblematic photographers in the galaxy of Condé Nast, the great media empire which published magazines such as Vanity Fairand Vogue, with his work for the latter the testimony of a privileged observer. Highly cultured and particularly sensitive to both classical aesthetics and Surrealism, Horst succeeded in showcasing the beautiful during one of the darkest periods of the last century, overshadowed by war and uncertainty. With a deeply evocative body of work shaped by an exquisite mastery of light, composition and gesture, Horst helped an entire generation of readers and creative talents to dream, and laid the foundations of a modern, sophisticated and timeless ideal of beauty.

«Horst could take the most beautiful, romantic images of a woman. Hoyningen-Huene made stronger ones, Avedon and I stranger ones, but his was always loving and respectful»

IRVING PENN, photographer