Beauty will save the world

Cwho was George Honyngen-Huene?

George Hoyningen-Huene is just a boy when he leaves Russia to follow his family fleeing the Revolution. At twenty he is in Paris and he, son of the century, born on 4 September 1900, seizes the opportunity.

The French capital is a crossroads of artists and intellectuals. That bohemian world full of stimuli coincides perfectly with Huene, noble of origin, cultured, polyglot and animated by aesthetic research. To express it he chooses photography and in short, George Hoyningen-Huene will be the master of all, as the photographer Richard Avedon will define him a few decades later.

From Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, Huene is the talent that invents light, sculpts bodies, designs a world on usthe set designer of the artifice. He is thirty years old when he meets Horst P. Horst, photographer and life partner with whom he merges love, art and adventure. They travel around the world, from Paris to London, New York and finally Hollywood where Huene falls in love with cinema, with new protagonists, lights and colours.

The archive and exhibition in Milan

We owe the care of his archive to Horst, who was also an immense photographer. Thanks to him it reached the spouses Tommy and Åsa Rönngren who in 2020 acquired it and kept it in Stockholm, creating the George Hoyningen-Huene Estate. Today we have the opportunity to discover it, with the exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan, the first ever dedicated to this great author in our country.
Little known and unfairly relegated to the exclusive field of fashion photography, Huene, a free man, crossed continents and cultures, animated by curiosity, experimenting on fashion and film sets, elevating formal construction to absolute creativity.

The interview

To talk about this great photographer and about art and beauty, we met a special interlocutor, Carla Sozzaniwho dedicated his life to both. After his experience in the world of periodical publishing, Vogue and then Elle, in 1990 he created Corso Como 10, exhibition space, bookshop, concept store, meeting place and much more where the great masters of photography exhibit. A successful experiment which, from the Lombardy capital, will be replicated in other international metropolises.
Today, in the name of continuity, far from the noise and contradictions of contemporary Milan, he faces the new adventure, the Sozzani Foundation which opened in via Bovisasca 87. A life full of encounters and challenges – thanks to an extraordinary partnership with her sister Franca, legendary director of Vogue Italia – which today summarizes in a newly released biography, Carla Sozzani – Arte Vita Moda written by Louise Baring For The Hippocampus publisherin which the multifaceted personality tells its story.

Painting, fashion, photography. The languages ​​of creativity intertwine and merge in Hoyningen-Huene.
Throughout his work there is the influence of neoclassicism and a very strong personal aesthetic. Beauty is statuesque, cold, never erotic or lascivious. The obsessive search for composition predominates, nothing is left to chance, everything is perfect, every movement is studied and light is the magnificent artifice from which the work is born. An artist has many things within him, but others depend on what he has absorbed. Huene seeks beauty through nature and lineage. And research needs freedom. From the ’20s and ’30s I remember images of picnics where everyone was shirtless, even the women. There was certainly a taste for provocation, but also a lot of freedom, which we women then claimed in ’68 and which originated precisely from that era. In Paris, in addition to artists and intellectuals such as Man Ray, Dalí, Cocteau, Huene became a friend and collaborator of Coco Chanel, photographing Madeleine Vionnet’s fluid dresses which created a new image of women; everything coincides and aligns to satisfy that idea of ​​beauty. In that world it was stimulating and inevitable to become contaminated: in my experience, artists know each other, hang out, exchange opinions, create a community. Many times I have brought together famous photographers for a dinner. I remember that, after one of these, I received a message from Peter Lindbergh in which he told me that he would like to create a fixed appointment on Sundays to meet, exchange ideas and love each other.

In the iconic image Divers, there are some mysteries.
I confess that I own it. It is an essential image. Beautiful. If you love aesthetics, fashion and elegance, that one image has everything. Artists in Paris spent all their time in the city, I like to believe it was taken on the roof of the local Vogue office, much less obvious than a beach. And then for Huene the love of artifice was more important than reality. As for the model, I think it was Horst. She is Lee Miller, model and then photographer who will pose for him in other images.

What is beauty for you?
Beauty is everything that touches my heart, what gives an emotion. My life is made up of many expressive languages, fashion, painting, photography, design: the search for beauty has inspired me every day to work with enthusiasm. I recognize it in the masters of photography, this is the case of Horst to whom I have dedicated three exhibitions – he became more famous than his teacher Huene, but they say that if the teacher is good, the student is better than the teacher – and of Helmut Newton , just to name one, who maintains total control of the subject when photography breaks through the perimeter of the studios, goes out into the street, seeks reality and spontaneity. Even if the languages ​​have changed, the great photographers are still all children of Huene. If we want to imagine continuity, Paolo Roversi today expresses it best. Probably if we asked him, in addition to Huene and Horst, he would mention Erwin Blumenfeld among his inspirations: for him, light created an image of the perfect, magnificent, dreamlike woman.

Would Huene have become such without Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar?
The great Japanese photographer Hiro had told me about a trip to India for Baazar where he had to photograph a pink coat on an elephant. From America to India for a coat. Creativity first of all! Photographer Louise DahlWolfe stopped working when, during a shoot, an editor asked her: “Can I look into the camera?”. At that moment he understood that he could not tolerate interference in his work as an artist. Freedom first of all! Richard Avedon was able to create incredible imagery because they always allowed him to. Without newspapers, photographers like Steven Meisel and others would not have become famous. Then advertising and advertisers began to take over. I lived the season in which the image had to be as beautiful as possible to make the reader dream. Over the years, this need has disappeared. Wanting to direct artists, it is more difficult to achieve beauty. Today some independent newspapers still manage to do this.

Glamor and avant-garde, is the title of the exhibition in question: what meaning do they have today?
The stylist Walter Albini, a great friend of mine, in the 80s, looking around, dreamed and missed the elegance of the first decades of the 20th century. If I think about those conversations today, I think I have come to realize that beauty, and therefore elegance, are not made of clothes, but of personality, of how we place ourselves in the world. I worked with Azzedine Alaïa for more than twenty years, he taught me rigor in work, even if my father had already thought of it. Being close to Alaïa, observing such a creative creator, working night and day – for him it wasn’t working, just as it isn’t for me – it was living to perfect a jacket, with the passion to always do better. Many artists passed through his house, preferably in the kitchen, even though he didn’t speak English but only French and almost never left his atelier. A loner who hung out all over the world.
When I met the American artist Kris Ruhs, who later became my partner, I was enchanted by his passion-obsession for work, by his ability to abstract himself from the world. I had the privilege of working with so many masters, Annie Leibovitz, David Bailey, Bruce Weber, Man Ray, Don McCullin, perhaps we could call them all avant-garde.

Who, if any, was your mentor?
Alfa Castaldi, great photographer and man of immense culture. From him, in the 70s, I learned a lot, even a sort of distance from fashion. The same one that his wife, Anna Piaggi, also implemented in a personal and very extravagant way. They both had this ironic, detached look, they loved fashion, but without being victims of it.

What do young people need?
For me, the desire to communicate, to give, to share is now more specifically aimed at new generationsthe. I have been lucky enough to meet so many different people and realities, that I think it is beautiful and useful to share this experience of mine. This is why I opened the Sozzani Foundation at Bovisaan extraordinary area where the Polytechnic of Design is located, a place full of young people, you can already notice it walking through the streets. And then there is the partnership with Sara, my daughter (Sara Sozzani Maino). Working together is truly wonderful.

Who are the masters today?
Nick Knight, London photographer, certainly is and through SHOWstudio tries to blaze new trails. Then there are those who are naturally like that Mats Gustafson, which I am a huge fan of, which is influencing all fashion design. Social media have taken over, but when you really want to look, when you look for beauty, you won’t find it on the web or on a mobile phone screen.. It’s totally different to see it on a page and enjoy it, isn’t it? Beauty will save us, I’m sure.

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