A Singular Elegance: The Photographs of Baron Adolph de Meyer.

Richard Martin

Second-rate photography benefits from an ascribed quintessence and allure seldom granted to second-rate painting and sculpture. In its happy ability to recall bygones, it offers us a bewitching sense of having been there. We remember best but least in shallow mirrors like those of Norman Parkinson and Baron Adolph de Meyer.

Looking at Parkinson's photographs of the '70s, for instance, one may feel, for a fleeting minute, that they contain the real spirit of the decade. But when I fondly returned to the fashion magazines of the time to view these images in their original setting, I found it was never Parkinson's work that stirred: a gloss of memory could make his images seem sexy, but Helmut Newton's indexical eroticism overwhelmed every page. An exoticism and lambent lust in Deborah Turbeville's photographs were more or less imitated by Parkinson, just as he had earlier followed Martin Munkacsi, Richard Avedon, and Willy Maywald--yet he never equaled any of these masters. Again and again, Parkinson's is not the great image, but the one we settle for.

Moreover, Parkinson's every photograph is enhanced by his public image. Our susceptibility to the genial con of the British self-concocted identity (ne Ronald Smith in 1913; all the rest is mustachioed affectation) adds immeasurably to the glamour of the work; his anachronistic invention of a fraudulently imperial self may sustain its charm for some today, but personal style doesn't make better pictures in any visual art. On the other hand, personal testimony does have its value: Parkinson's own books (the provocative Sisters under the Skin, 1978, the rapscallion Would You Let Your Daughter?, 1987, and his firsthand accounts in Fifty Years of Style and Fashion: Norman Parkinson, 1983) reveal far more about him than this new book. Additionally, Martin Harrison neglects one of the best insights into Parkinson, which was provided by his wife Wenda in the 15 January 1971 issue of Vogue. Writing about their Tobago house, she rhapsodizes that it was built as "a kind of temple, I'm not sure to what, perhaps to living." What the Vogue piece reveals is not that Parkinson sought paradise--nothing ignoble in that--but, unfortunately for his work, that he sought it for himself rather than for his images.

Seeing de Meyer's images in another volume is to see another phantom rendered visible in photographs (in this case, ones rendered more apparitionlike by their own coy Pictorialism). But, despite Anne Ehrenkranz's trenchant text, the book underplays de Meyer's writings in order to focus on his corpus of images, most of which are printed from the fashion magazines in the absence of originals destroyed by their creator in 1938. This is unfortunate, because the significance of de Meyer's life in fashion resides in the tandem of words and images he published until he took leave of the fashion world in 1932. His destruction of the photographs may be a loss for the nostalgic and a quandary for the historian, but one can ask how important these photographs are, after all.

Beaton shrewdly and not unpleasantly said of de Meyer that "he was not afraid of producing an almost empty photograph." A photograph of Rita de Acosta Lydig (ca. 1913) is improbably empty, so filled is it with our knowledge of her colorful life and high sensibility, so filled is it with the evocation of John Singer Sargent's Madame X--but what does de Meyer himself finally offer us? Likewise, we are delighted to visit with Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and to see the Ballets Russes up close; in these images, de Meyer shares with us his place in the Edwardian world. But these photographs too remain curiously barren of information or interest beyond the superficial level of the flaneur's wandering and the flatterer's wooing.

Indeed, de Meyer's most compelling enthusiasms are expressed in his passionate and informed essays, which, despite stilted prose, convey a joy in fashion and in women of beauty that, while on some level reigned, constitutes a more compelling witness than most of the Baron's equivocal, nebulous photographs. Consider, for example, his sagacious comments from 1926: "I firmly believe in fashions which are absolutely plain, and that only the most sophisticated and luxurious simplicity is a la mode. As this happens to be the most costly style of dressing, very few women can afford it. Therefore, simplicity being expensive, more so than glittering splendor, dressmakers in these days of the high cost of living, when most people feel hard up or poor, evidently feel compelled to include in their collections rich-looking models for those unable to afford luxurious simplicity." By this standard, de Meyer's own photographs seem excessive in their propensity for perverse obscurantism and splendor-sparkled extravagance.

Ironically, it would be Modernism's literalness that would make de Meyer demode by the early '30s. He was supplanted by those who sought the collaged modernity of art, fashion, and graphic design envisioned by Alexei Brodovitch. Willis Hartshorn claims in his introduction that de Meyer "is a model from whom many other fashion photographers follow." If he is thinking of photographers today whose photographs are even fuzzier than de Meyer's, photographs in which a Gap jacket is indistinguishable from one by Jil Sander or Comme des Garcons, de Meyer is a pernicious model. Instead, we should perhaps reconstitute the keen critical sensibility evident in his writings, which transcend the photographs and make his magical world vivid once again.

Richard Martin is curator of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.