Feb 25, 2016 - Sale 2406

Sale 2406 - Lot 111

Price Realized: $ 35,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
RICHARD AVEDON (1923-2004)
Suzy Parker and Robin Tattersall, evening dress by Grès, Moulin Rouge. Oversized silver print, 17 3/4x14 3/4 inches (45.1x37.5 cm.), with Avedon's signature and edition notation 7/25, in pencil, and his hand stamp, on verso. 1957; printed 1977
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Additional Details

From the Staley-Wise Gallery, New York, New York; to a Private Collector.

Richard Avedon--affectionately known as 'Dick' by friends and family--was a born and bred New Yorker, whose chance encounter with photography turned into a lifelong passion and obsession. His father had been a co-owner of a women's wear department store, and as a youth, Avedon had admired photographs in Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, and Vanity Fair, issues of which his father kept in their home. In 1942, Avedon joined the Merchant Marines, and his father presented him with a Rolleiflex camera as a going away present, prompting him to apply for a job in the service's photography branch.

By 1947, Avedon had impressed Alexey Brodovitch, who was then editor of Harper's Bazaar, with his singular photographic eye, and started by photographing for Junior Bazaar. Avedon approached fashion subjects with an innovative, intrepid attitude. Where photographs of women's fashions had previously been lifeless and limited in appeal, his innovative approach paid little attention to sharpness, which most commercial photographers sought. In Cathy Horyn's 2009 article for the New York Times, she wrote, "[Avedon] saw not so much the fashion in the streets as the cosmopolitan gestures that animated it. Movement entered his pictures for Harper's Bazaar soon after he arrived there. Storytelling followed."

In 1958, Winthrop Sargeant wrote a glowing profile of Avedon for The New Yorker, in which he observed: "The Avedon photograph--or, more broadly, the Avedon photographic style--has by now become a lively contribution to the visual poetry of sophisticated urban life. It has been imitated by other photographers, but the imitations have seldom approached the animation of the originals; in any case, as soon as the imitators have mastered at least the surface elements of one of Avedon's innovations, he has always popped up with some entirely new departure, for he has never been one to stand still." In 1985, Avedon became the magazine's first staff photographer, a position he held until his death, in 2004.

Sargeant's profile on Avedon was written the year following this exquisite and lively photograph of Suzy Parker, who was then Avedon's favorite model. Of Avedon's fashion portraits, he wrote: "The key to Avedon's art is to be found not in his technical devices, which he invents and discards with restless rapidity, but in his preoccupation with the looks, mannerisms, and gestures of human beings, whom he appears to regard as actors performing in dramas of his own invention."

This notion of "human beings as actors" is especially evident in the detail of can-can dancers behind Parker and her handsome date, Robin Tattersall. What Sargeant refers to as the "Avedon blur"--a deliberate, precise impression of the imperfect focus often encountered by novice photographers--allows for the moment to feel candid, lending levity (and a hint of camp) to the Moulin Rouge's dramatic stage light on Parker's Madame Grès evening dress.

Many have written about Avedon's love of photographing women, his ability to create unflinching visual drama without sacrificing tenderness and intimacy. Philip Gefter, renowned photography critic and author, perhaps said it most succinctly in a 2005 New York Times piece: "Despite decades of imitators, Avedon has proved inimitable. His curiosity fueled his imagination. He anticipated the tone of each era with a sophistication that was precision-cut in the stratosphere of art, fashion and culture at which he so naturally, and tenaciously, hovered. He never stopped experimenting with the photographic image and, always, his pictures reflect a regard for women that was truly debonair."