What happens when being born who you are makes you heir to an important body of artistic work done by a father or a grandfather? When you inherit not only a trove of major artworks but also the responsibility for preserving them, exhibiting them, managing the commerical use of them, continuing to make them live. In a word, you are charged with the legacy of the artist. Such is the world into which Nadia Charbit, granddaughter of renowned photographer Erwin Blumenfeld, and Fiammetta Horvat, daughter of famous fashion photographer Frank Horvat, were born. They will be in conversation with Margery Arent Safir about the works they inherited and what happens to one’s own life when that work is yours to curate and care for.
Erwin Blumenfeld (1897 – 1969), a Berlin-born American photographer, was one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. An experimenter and innovator, he produced an extensive body of work including drawings, collages, portraits and nudes, celebrity portraiture, advertising campaigns, and his renowned fashion photography both in black and white and color, for such publications as Harper’s Bazaar, Life, and American Vogue. His personal photography had two main interests, death and women, and showed the influence of Dadaism and Surrealism. He was an expert in laboratory work, and experimented with photographic techniques such as distortion, multiple exposure, photo-montage, and solarisation. Major retrospectivdes of his work have been held at the Barbican Center in London and, at Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume, and Musee d’Art et d’Hisotire du Judaiisme in Paris.
Frank Horvat (1928 –2020), an Italian photographer who lived and worked in France, was internationally renowned for his sophisticated fashion photography, spanning seven decades, and credited as one of the founders of contemporary French fashion photography. His opus also embraced classic “reportage,” and he was unafraid to experiment and adapt to new technologies, transcending the confines of conventional photography. His published interviews with fellow photographs, Entre Vues, are now considered a work of reference. Other publications include Yao the Cat (1993), where he adopts computer technology, Bestiary, Ovid’s Metamorhposes, and, in 2000, Figures Romanes with a text by French historian Michel Pastoureau, and 1999, the photo-diary of the last year of the millennium. In 2010, he received the Fondazione del Centenario Award in 2010 for his contributions to European culture.
Reservations are required: rsvp@artsarena.org