'Dovima with elephants, evening dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, August 1955 Photograph by Richard Avedon; © The Richard Avedon Foundation
“That wonderful, terrible mirror” was how poet Jean Cocteau described the photographer Richard Avedon (1923–2004), whose camera often sought out fault lines in the faces of the greats, while magnifying ordinary folk to heroic stature. “My obsession,” the photographer once wrote, was “with the human predicament,” though he added, “It is possible that what I think is the human predicament is merely my own.” The splendid fruits of this endeavor, including his groundbreaking, uncannily energetic fashion photography and his brilliantly confrontational portraiture, are on view in Paris until Saturday evening, when Christie’s will be auctioning off more than 60 prints from the photographer’s estate to benefit the Avedon Foundation. (Proceeds from the sale, estimated at between $3.7 million and $6 million, will fund an endowment to support the foundation’s scholarly and philanthropic missions.)
“Avedon didn’t invest a great deal of time or energy in building up a market for his work,” says Philippe Garner, the international head of Christie’s 20th-Century Decorative Art & Photography department. “He was too focused on taking and making pictures.” The images in this sale—the largest group of his works to ever come on the market—have been carefully selected to “whet the appetites of collectors,” Garner added. “Many are one-off and very special.”
Among the latter is a more than seven-by-five-foot print of Dovima with the Elephants (1955), showing the willowy model bracketed by pachyderms at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris and wearing a gown that the teenaged Yves Saint Laurent designed for Christian Dior. So large that it had to be printed on two sheets of paper, it’s estimated to sell for between $500,000 and $800,000. (Made for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1978 survey of Avedon’s fashion work, this was the print that for decades greeted visitors to his studio.) There are working prints, fashion shots made for magazines, mounted on cardboard that still bears the notations of Avedon and his editors (such as Carmen, evening dress by Lanvin-Castillo [1957], estimated at $20, 402–$34,003). And among the classic portraits of artists (Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett, the Beatles), political figures (Malcolm X), and rodeo contestants, physical therapists, grain threshers, and the like, from his series In the American West, there’s a tiny vintage print of a pensive Marilyn Monroe, a lost child in a sequined evening gown (estimate: $108,811–$163,216).
The sale is taking place against the backdrop of Paris Photo (November 18-21), the leading international fair for photography, where prices for fashion work have spiraled, especially over the past five years. But in Avedon’s pictures, the pure joy with which Robin Tattersall and Suzy Parker (wearing a dress by Dior) roller-skate past the Place de la Concorde in 1956 and in a Paris newly reborn from the horrors of war (Lot #3; estimate: $34,003–$47,605), transcends fashion. “Avedon’s work is constantly exploring what it is to be a human being,” Garner says, “how we are all engaged in defining an image of ourselves, projecting that image, and questioning it.”
Among the latter is a more than seven-by-five-foot print of Dovima with the Elephants (1955), showing the willowy model bracketed by pachyderms at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris and wearing a gown that the teenaged Yves Saint Laurent designed for Christian Dior. So large that it had to be printed on two sheets of paper, it’s estimated to sell for between $500,000 and $800,000. (Made for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1978 survey of Avedon’s fashion work, this was the print that for decades greeted visitors to his studio.) There are working prints, fashion shots made for magazines, mounted on cardboard that still bears the notations of Avedon and his editors (such as Carmen, evening dress by Lanvin-Castillo [1957], estimated at $20, 402–$34,003). And among the classic portraits of artists (Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett, the Beatles), political figures (Malcolm X), and rodeo contestants, physical therapists, grain threshers, and the like, from his series In the American West, there’s a tiny vintage print of a pensive Marilyn Monroe, a lost child in a sequined evening gown (estimate: $108,811–$163,216).
The sale is taking place against the backdrop of Paris Photo (November 18-21), the leading international fair for photography, where prices for fashion work have spiraled, especially over the past five years. But in Avedon’s pictures, the pure joy with which Robin Tattersall and Suzy Parker (wearing a dress by Dior) roller-skate past the Place de la Concorde in 1956 and in a Paris newly reborn from the horrors of war (Lot #3; estimate: $34,003–$47,605), transcends fashion. “Avedon’s work is constantly exploring what it is to be a human being,” Garner says, “how we are all engaged in defining an image of ourselves, projecting that image, and questioning it.”
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