Horst P. Horst, Works from the Estate @Stellan Holm

JTF (just the facts): A total of 20 black and white and 5 color photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung in the single room space. There are 17 gelatin silver prints, 3 platinum palladium prints, and 5 c-prints in the show. Physical dimensions range from 10x8 to 20x16 or reverse, with no edition information available. The images were made between 1933 and 1990. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: This selection of Horst's work passes over his best known photographs and dives deeper into the storage boxes, unearthing more secondary and lesser known images, both in black and white and in color. The show gathers together a few early portraits and fashion shots from the 1930s and 1940s, and pairs them with male nudes from the 1950s and florals from later in his life. The result is a broader view of his artistic approach and his influences on contemporary photographers.

The connection between Horst and Robert Mapplethorpe is particularly obvious in this group of pictures. Horst's male nudes are classically staged, seated sculpturally on pedestals or lying on flat tables, spotlit to accent the lines of symmetrical musculature. The nudes are pared down and formal, but alive with power and grace. Horst's flowers are often placed together with classical busts, or arranged in vases to highlight their sculptural forms and saturated extravagant colors. There is a sense of elegant, meticulous control in both subjects that is unmistakably echoed by Mapplethorpe, a commonality of vision and aesthetic between the two artists that is made clear by these more obscure works from the archives.

Perhaps it has already been done, but this exhibit made me think there is an amazing show to be organzied which would authoritatively match stylistically similar pairs of images by Horst and Mapplethorpe. I'm guessing that the parallels would be fascinating, and the side-by-side comparison would crispen our understanding of their subtle differences.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show range in price from $8000 to $30500. Horst's work is widely available in the secondary markets, with dozens of prints available at auction each year. Recent prices have ranged between $2000 and nearly $300000 (for a vintage Mainbocher Corset).

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
.
Transit Hub:

• Estate site (here)

Horst P. Horst, Works from the Estate
Through November 12th

Stellan Holm Gallery
1018 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075

David Levinthal, I.E.D.: War in Afghanistan and Iraq @Stellan Holm

JTF (just the facts): A total of 18 color images, framed in white with no mat, and hung in the front and back gallery spaces. All of the works are archival pigment prints on polyester film, sized 43x56, made in 2008 and printed in editions of 10. All of the images are untitled. A monograph of this project has recently been published by powerHouse books (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: After a number of years of full time conflict in both Iraq and Afghanistan, we have all become accustomed to (some might say overloaded by and numb to) images of war; they appear daily on our television screens, on the Internet, and in newspapers and magazines. Pictures of troops in desert fatigues, toting machine guns, and fighting from Humvees in dusty barren lands or rubble strewn cities and towns have become uncomfortably commonplace, as have the reports of bomb blasts and casualties.

David Levinthal's images of these wars were not made as an embedded reporter, perilously riding along with a front-line army battalion; on the contrary, they were made in the safety of his studio using the toy soldiers produced as patriotic merchandise for children. His fictional images are however hauntingly similar in look and feel to the works made by our most celebrated photojournalists and war correspondents, creating a powerful sense of dissonance when standing in the white walled gallery.

.

Levinthal has been making images using toys for decades now, so he has clearly mastered the use of cropping, camera angles, shadow and blur to mimic the hectic action and movement he wants to recreate. Most of the images in the show are wrapped in a choking yellow/orange haze, dusty and atmospheric. Within this sandstorm, the fragments and details of war - a bloody head, a car on fire, leaders yelling, a set of goggles perched on a helmet, a group of soldiers piling out of a Humvee ready for a house to house fight, the barrel of a machine gun - are singled out and used to build small, tense, open-ended narratives. A second set of images use the spooky green glow of night vision to pick out the close-up movements of a tank, the silhouette of a rocket launcher, or a disorienting battle in the dark. Squint your eyes and you're watching CNN.
.

A scholarly reading of this work might focus on the "disassembly" or "deconstruction" of photojournalism, and on how the ubiquity of media imagery has changed the way we see and process war-time images; indeed, these pictures can certainly be seen as a kind of satire of photojournalism. But I think a related way to read these pictures is to see them as a reminder that fiction can be just as powerful as truth in shaping our emotions and reactions. Sure, these are simplistic and imaginary constructions, but they are oddly successful in tapping into real "memories". What I like best about these works is that they take the age old argument about truth in photography and turn it on its head; fact and fiction have been satisfyingly muddled, and we are forced to step back and reconsider how the images around us construct our view of reality.

.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced at $25000 each, which to be honest seems pretty high. Levinthal's photographs have been intermittently available in the secondary markets of late, with a handful of lots selling each year, ranging in price from $1000 to $10000. Levinthal is officially represented in New York by Gering & López Gallery (here). While these works don't fit into our particular collection, they will certainly find strong resonance and interplay with other images of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Bad Barbie @John McWhinnie, 2009 (here)

David Levinthal, I.E.D.: War in Afghanistan and Iraq

Through February 13th

.

Stellan Holm Gallery

524 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011