A Marriage of Commerce and Art

Richard Avedon claimed many distinctions in his long and productive life as a photographer, but one stands out as a sign of his unusual stature and appeal: He’s the only artist I can think of who was ever the basis for a fictional character in a successful Hollywood film.

In the 1957 movie “Funny Face,” Fred Astaire -- playing opposite Audrey Hepburn -- brought his signature mix of high-style grace and popular charm to the thinly disguised character, Dick Avery, a glamorous fashion photographer.

For Avedon, it didn’t matter whether he was taking pictures of supermodel Dovima dressed in Dior (1955), or of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld as a button-down bureaucrat (1976) or of a blank-faced, unknown Texas farm girl in overalls (1985). Through black-and-white photographs that always emphasized theatricality over darkroom technique and subject, he was the Astaire of the camera.

In 1977, Avedon was the focus of a 30-year retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art organized by Colta Ives and Weston Naef (now curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum).

The idea of a fashion photographer showing at the Met in the same halls as Velazquez, Rembrandt and the rest was outlandish 27 years ago. It was also overdue. The stigma of commerce, always faintly ridiculous, was finally giving way in American artistic circles, and which applied art could hasten things along better (or faster) than fashion photography?

As creator of arguably the greatest fashion photograph ever made, Avedon was the ideal candidate for the Met’s exhibition. Irving Penn -- like Avedon a protege of Alexey Brodovitch who also worked extensively for Vogue -- is surely the more nuanced and radically modern artist. But “Dovima With Elephants,” made to sell dresses, ranks as preeminent -- a formally brilliant fusion of the muscle of mass media with the power of myth.

The great sweep of the white satin sash on the Dior evening gown inserts itself seamlessly into a chained chorus line of galumphing elephant legs. The model’s body -- a sinuous, tightly sheathed black curve, notched at the bosom -- slides effortlessly into the upraised trunk of an enormous rearing animal. One hand rests gently on its phallic snout, while the other executes an operatic gesture of command that seems to turn a second immense creature aside.

The massiveness of the Beast is no match for the slimness of Beauty’s arm. As if in an antique marble frieze, Dovima is the long-limbed Roman goddess Diana wrapped in Parisian couture, an aloof virgin princess whose magical authority over nature is explicit.

Sure enough, mere mortal consumers of magazines can hardly look away. If he’d made no other photographs than this one, Avedon would be remembered for its astonishing visual achievement.

Indeed, there is some irony to the division he probably made between commercial assignments such as this and his more personal photographs -- his dying father; drifters, wildcatters and indigents in the American West; revelers at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate -- that align with more conventional ideas of what constitutes art. Much of that work is undistinguished. But if we are unable to acknowledge and thoroughly embrace the audacious aesthetic energy of his singular commercial work, the failure resides only in us.