Gisèle Freund’s gorgeous photographs of modernist heroes
James Joyce
German-born French photographer Gisèle Freund had one fascinating life. She was a student of Adorno in the 1930s and fled Germany for France and eventually Argentina during World War II. Her portrait of James Joyce–a notoriously difficult get–appeared on the May 8, 1939, cover of Time Magazine. In the 1950s her “liberal” views got her into trouble with the McCarthyites. Her luxurious photos of Eva Perón, which appeared in Life Magazine in 1950, got the magazine banned in Argentina (and also precipitated her departure from that country).
Gisèle Freund, self-portrait
In 1983 she was named Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, the highest decoration in France, and eight years later she became the first photographer to be honored with a retrospective at the Musée National d’art Moderne in Paris. Of her gift for portraiture, she said, “When you do not like human beings, you cannot make good portraits.” These marvelous pics of an astonishing range of painters and writers are at once slightly affected (Cocteau and the hand) and wonderfully intimate.
Henri Matisse
Virginia Woolf
Jean Cocteau
Simone de Beauvoir
Jean-Paul Sartre
T.S. Eliot
Walter Benjamin
Colette
Man Ray
Pierre Bonnard
André Breton
Arthur Koestler
George Bernard Shaw
Frida Kahlo
Thornton Wilder
Marcel Duchamp
Paul Valéry