CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/10/2019

What a wonderful illusion in 'Horst P. Horst'

"Jean Patchett, bathing suit by Brigance" (1951) is reproduced from Silvana's charming new monograph on the iconic twentieth-century Vogue fashion photographer, Horst P. Horst. Socialites, models, nudes, still lives, actors and public intellectuals populate the pages of this concise volume, which spans the 1930s to the 1980s. "In the modern age, surrounded by images of brutality and photographs hastily snatched, we crave Horst's flawless vision of beauty more than ever," Victoria and Albert curator Susanna Brown writes. "His pictures evoke a bygone age of elegance and serenity, an atmosphere of luxury and fantasy. It might all be an illusion, created within the confines of his photographic studio, but what a wonderful illusion it is."