Starting With Fashion, Ending With Art

By ROBERTA SMITH

Five years after Richard Avedon’s death at 81 the International Center of Photography is setting the record straight. Avedon was indeed a great artist, and his fashion photographs are his greatest work.

This may not be quite the way Avedon wanted it. His own pursuit of greatness often involved playing down the half-century of fashion magazine work he did for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue as little more than a day job and emphasizing his portraiture, which he produced voluminously. At least that’s how it seemed with his last big New York retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1994; that 50-year survey included, shockingly, fewer than a dozen examples of the fashion work.

“Avedon Fashion: 1944-2000” is the corrective, the first museum exhibition devoted exclusively to his fashion work. Its nearly 180 images and ephemera confirm Avedon’s place in the history and the art of his time.

Avedon’s fashion photographs from the late 1940s to the early ’60s are everything you want great art to be: exhilarating, startlingly new and rich enough with life and form to sustain repeated viewings. Their beauty is joy incarnate and contagious. The best of them are as perfect on their own terms as the best work of Jackson Pollock or Jasper Johns from that era, and as profoundly representative of it.

As with these painters Avedon’s work represents an important turning point and a new kind of self-consciousness of his medium. He makes us aware of its process on different levels, while also questioning its values and deflating its pretensions. His images have a new tautness; you see them as energy-producing wholes in which every detail and bit of surface is articulated. Like Abstract Expressionist painting, they show us an art form learning from and then moving beyond European conventions.

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Avedon Fashion: 1944-2000” continues through Sept. 6 at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street; (212) 857-0000,
www.icp.org

Richard Avedon
Veruschka, dress by Kimberly, New York, January 1967
© 2009 The Richard Avedon Foundation