The Art of Herbert List

The following is excerpted from Stephen Spender’s introduction to the book Herbert List: Junge Männer.

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Herbert came to signify for me the freedom and spontaneity which I associated with the Weimer Republic – today much despised, but in retrospect, I think, really a post-1918 interlude and idyll of humanist living.

Herbert’s values were personal. He wanted to live his physical and mental being rather than become a business or conventional social success. He was proud to be a good merchant, but, essentially, his success as a business man amused him merely, just as it would have amused him to play some game extremely well.

[When I first knew him in 1929] he did not want to be a professional photographer. A camera was to him an instrument for capturing the statue-like gesture of some beautiful young man. Looking at these photographs, the spectator has the sense of seeing beyond the photograph to the original moment which so captivated the eye rather than the lens of the photographer. This is art, the expression entrapped from a rare instant of reality, of Herbert’s vision of the original model, at a moment when reality as it were transcended itself. This is the fulfillment of Herbert’s inner life coinciding with his recognition of the external moment given.

Herbert’s friends were, I suppose, divided between those he was physically attracted to and those he loved for their vivid personalities, their conversation. Many of us are often aware of this kind of division of interest in our relationships with friends. But with Herbert when he was young this division seemed absolute. It had a quality of doom affecting his whole way of life. I remember him saying to me once at Schwimmbad: “The boys with beautiful bodies have uninteresting faces, and the boys with interesting faces do not have beautiful bodies.”

. . . This does not mean that Herbert was uninterested in the personalities of his living statues – some of them close friends, some of them casual acquaintances. In fact, his anecdotes about them, made up a good deal of his most amusing conversation. Moreover, with a privileged few, he was really in love. Nevertheless the beautiful young men always stuck me as trapezists and performers at some wonderful fare: like, perhaps, the circus people, dancers in early paintings, or drawings and etchings by Picasso.

Herbert List never tried to make his photography look like paintings. They exist entirely in terms of their own medium – photography. Yet within those terms he is very conscious of painting, and even more so of sculpture.

. . . His photographs of young men are much influenced by classical and Renaissance art. The young men selected by him for models are, for the most part, beautiful by the standards of Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture, and by the Renaissance ones of Michelangelo’s sculpture and of his figures of youths painted on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. They remind us that the ideal of the art of the classical revival in Europe was the drawing of the nude male model, a center from which all other drawing radiated. List’s photographs exemplify standards derived from the Renaissance pencil or ink drawings and – almost as an extension of this – the black and white photography of German and Russian stills from the movies of the late Twenties and early Thirties. Color can only detract from these powerfully liner and chiaroscuro images. The figures themselves and their poses are often statuesque. This is heroic art related to Greek statues but also, in our modern times to the idea – present in Cezanne’s few paintings of male nude bathers, in Seurat, and in Picasso – that the male nude, usually of a working man, stands outside and beyond the bourgeois system of class, superior in the magnificence of the architecture of bone, the potency of flesh.