Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Glamour was a birthright for George Hoyningen-Huene. The son of the chief equerry to Tsar Nicholas II in 1900, Hoyningen-Huene fled the Russian Revolution for a photographer’s life in Paris. There, the Baltic Baron befriended Henri Cartier-Bresson and Man Ray and developed his own style, blending his love of antiquity with an avant-garde sensibility and a portraitist’s sensitivity to character. By 1925, he was chief of photography for Vogue Paris and shooting dreamlike pictures for Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. He soon garnered a reputation as a Paris party-scene stalwart, a perfectionist and a fitness fanatic. “When George Huene took me to see Jean Cocteau smoking opium I considered that adult life could reach no higher,” recalled Cecil Beaton. Hoyningen-Huene died in 1968 and never made limited editions of his prints. What was printed went to magazine picture desks and the breadth of his work, from sun-struck shots of archaeological sites in north Africa to shimmering couture shoots for Lanvin and Schiaparelli, has dissolved into the shadows. Philippe Garner, former deputy chairman at Christie’s, who was an instrumental figure in the development of the modern photography market in the early 1970s, says that he “missed the boat”. But that, perhaps, is about to change.This year has seen an exhibition exploring Hoyningen-Huene’s friendship with Coco Chanel at Chanel Nexus Hall in Tokyo, a Josephine Baker show featuring his work at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie and a new book by curator and writer Susanna Brown. A Netflix series chronicling his Jazz Age antics is also rumoured to be in the works. His art appeals to contemporary taste, says Garner, for its “refined instinct for those elusive qualities we call glamour”. Hoyningen-Huene shot in colour for Harper’s Bazaar in the 1940s, but his monochrome fashion and celebrity pictures from the prewar years are most collectable, both in the rare silver-gelatin prints from the period and those printed by his lover, the German photographer Horst P Horst, in platinum-palladium editions after his death. Berlin gallerist Benjamin Jaeger partnered with Tommy Rönngren, the Swedish entrepreneur and art collector who acquired the photographer’s estate in 2020, on George Hoyningen-Huene: Glamour & Style, from which a range of platinum-palladium prints are available. Jaeger has a print of Hoyningen-Huene’s most famous photograph, Divers, from 1930 (€60,000), made in the 1980s by Horst. Hoyningen-Huene pictures two figures, most likely Horst and Lee Miller, perched on a diving board looking out across what looks like a hazy Mediterranean sea. The shot is a complete fiction. It was taken on the rooftop of Vogue’s Parisian studio. “This illusion is so perfect,” says Jaeger. A lesser-known maritime-themed picture of Lee Miller in sailcloth overalls is going for €11,200.Prints from the ’20s and ’30s “are very rare but when they do appear on the market, they certainly make a splash”, says Emily Bierman, Sotheby’s head of photographs. “While the platinum-palladium prints are beautiful to behold on a gallery wall, the much smaller vintage prints contain important clues for historians like me,” adds Brown, who wrote the recent book on Hoyningen-Huene. These were working objects as “evidenced by the pinholes in their corners or the fingerprints on their surface”, where they would have been pinned up on picture-desk mood boards.Ben Burdett at Atlas Gallery in London says that vintage works do still turn up. A world auction record for Hoyningen-Huene was set at Sotheby’s New York in 2002 when a vintage print of Divers from 1930 emerged from the Condé Nast archive, selling for $110,000. Atlas is offering a 1930 portrait of Princess Irene Galitzine, the fashion designer famed for creating the “palazzo pyjama”, for £5,700. This February, an initialled 1930 portrait of Beaton leaning coquettishly against a doorway was offered at Christie’s from the Elton John Collection. Darius Himes, Christie’s international head of photographs, calls it “a gorgeous historical object that hints at so many stories from Paris in the inter-war years”. It sold for £4,032. But, Bierman notes, there are other gems. “I love another bathers image from 1929 of Georgia Graves wearing swimwear by Lelong.”Rönngren is currently looking for a missing portfolio called “The Most Beautiful Women in Paris”, a long-lost collaboration between Hoyningen-Huene and Man Ray. If it does reappear, he might have competition. François Pinault recently snapped up a trove of classic prints by Hoyningen-Huene from the Condé Nast Collection. For those on a more modest budget, an elegantly printed Divers can be enjoyed on the 2000s cover of the Penguin Classics edition of The Great Gatsby. It’s available on eBay for £4.
