Grace Kelly for LIFE, by Philippe Halsman, 1953, Gelatin Silver Print, 14" x 11". ...

Description

Grace Kelly for LIFE, by Philippe Halsman, 1953, Gelatin Silver Print, 14" x 11". Gelatin silver semi-gloss double-weight 14" x 11" print of Grace Kelly, for LIFE, 1953, by Philippe Halsman, with COPYRIGHT © BY PHILIPPE HALSMAN (2) rubber stamp and signed "Philippe Halsman" in graphite on the verso. Cover variant for LIFE story, April 26, 1954. Very Fine+.

More Information: "We would like to show our readers how a Life cover is made. Since you have shot more Life covers than any other photographer, we would like you to photograph a young actress of your choice as if you were making a life cover. If we are lucky her portrait might even wind up as a real cover... I found Grace Kelly very photogenic but always under icy self-control. Photographing her full face, I did not seem to get the emotional impact I would have liked to show on the cover. Therefore, I concentrated on her profile.; it was one of the most perfect profiles I had ever seen... I brought my photographs to Life magazine and suggested Grace Kelly as a cover possibility. Ray Mackland, the picture editor, replied, "But she is still absolutely unknown. Let's wait and see how her career develops... A couple of months later, Mackland called me to say that Kelly had become the hottest thing in Hollywood. He had assigned two photographers to take her picture but to my surprise, it was my profile shot of Grace that made the cover. To my knowledge, It was the first time that an already published photograph was used as a Life cover."
(Halsman Portraits, Halsman, Yvonne & Philippe Halsman & Irene Halsman Rosenberg & Jane Halsman Bellow, NY 1983, McGraw Hill, p. 123)

Philippe Halsman was among a very few professional photographers of the first rank who benefitted from the formal dictates of being a photographer for hire: after he emigrated to America in 1940 to escape from the Nazi occupation of Paris he began a lifelong relationship with LIFE magazine, eventually shooting 101 covers, the most of any photographer. Halsman's reaction to the painterly soft focus and Pictorialism of his contemporaries in Paris in the 1920s was his intention to create more psychologically spare and probing portraits, to anatomize the barrier between the invisible, authentic life within and the visible personality puffed and rehearsed which was the face usually shown to photographers. "I looked at photographs which were then fashionable in Paris and I did not like them. They were diffused, pretentious, and arty. I saw myself fighting this trend. I wanted to show that photography could be realistic, strong, simple, and very sharp." Halsman's abandoned degree in engineering dovetailed with his preoccupation with the technical constraints facing him when he began portrait work from his small studio in Paris. Frustrated by the two-second delay in shutter speed, he had a twin-lens reflex camera which produced larger (9 x 12 cm negatives), matched with two 210mm Tessar lenses, custom housed to provide him a direct view through the aperture frontally to his subject. He could then conjure a fleeting pose that could be instantaneously captured by his camera.

"This fascination with the human face has never left me. Every face I see seems to hide – and sometimes fleetingly reveal – the mystery of another human being. Later, capturing this revelation became the goal and passion of my life. I became a collector of the reflections of the innermost self of the people who faced my camera." Halsman's portraits of Marilyn Monroe – his favorite female subject – reproduced by LIFE in April 1952 (the cover "THERE IS A CASE FOR INTERPLANETARY SAUCERS") have become celebrated as avatars of the sensual cloaked in the formal architecture of commercial reportage. That LIFE cover of Marilyn bifurcated against a dark door and light wall in a tufted evening gown has become so entwined among the canonic echo of primary images of her, that it has come to stand as the representative image of a woman emerging into global consciousness, confidently beckoning yet demure. As a twentieth-century Aphrodite, Marilyn was bequeathed a sensual innocence within a Surrealistic tableau of armless or legless repose silhouetted against an artificially dreamlike facade: Halsman's rare gift was to suggest sexuality without eroticizing his female subjects concretely, to depict allure without carnality.

His thirty-seven years of collaboration with Salvador Dalí became a springboard for artistic fantasy, anarchic humor, formal experimentation, and fraternal joy. The Dalís wintered every year for forty years in a private suite at the St Regis hotel on East 55th Street, a quick jaunt to Halsman's studio at 33 West 67th Street, where the two entered into parlor games of one-upmanship and anarchic creativity resulting in magical sequences of sublimely playful imagery. The three hours of sculpting seven nude models to produce the refined sensuality of In Voluptas Mors – or "Dalí Skull" - finds Dalí perched like a messenger deity overseeing the exalted ritual. Dalí allowed himself to be used as a frenzied human canvas of talismanic zeal bordering on missionary conscription. The Dalí Mustache series, in particular, was used to procreate and immortalize the outstanding feature of the Dalí persona with as little fuss but maximum utility in near endless sorties into the wilderness of mutual entreaty and mischievous surprise. No other artistic collaboration of the past century gave birth to so much freedom of impulse and manic discipline.

The view into this collection is to appreciate the high level of imagery acquired by one savvy collector and to lament that Halsman's public profile as a progenitor of much of the past century's most memorable imagery has not been sufficiently memorialized in total, except by public institutions.