• Excellent fashion (and travel) Photographer
• Color coordinator for Hollywood movies
• Relative of us, Friend of famous persons
• With an American mother, like many of our overseas relatives...

Interested in learning more about his life and work? Read this article!

Childhood and Beginning Adolescence (1900 - 1914)

George was born in St. Petersburg on 4 September 1900. His father, Barthold Theodor was laird on Nawwast, i.e. he is member of the house Nawwast. His elder brother was Ernst who was first laird on Lelle and later in Oberammergau.) Barthold was Colonel of the Guard off-duty and Chief Equerry to the Tsar: With this job, he was very busy. He is reported to have had a quite imperious (not to say somewhat arrogant) attitude, being in charge of 1200 men. He was proud on his ancestors. The German emperor Wilhelm II was his personal friend (he regarded his Hohenzollern family rather as upstarts).

George's father was rarely at home. If he was, the relationship to his three children was not warm according to today's standards: he once poisoned George's dog to teach him a lesson). In his personal memories, George wrote: "I seldom saw my father. He was usually on his estate or traveling and buying horses for the emperor." For the following years in St. Petersburg he recalls "Now I seldom saw my father. Eventually the failure of my attempts to win his attention turned into fear, then open defiance, and finally hatred."

The mother of George, Anne Van Ness Lothrop, was of American origin. Her father (originally from Grosse Pointe, MI) was the United States Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to the court of the Tsar Alexander III. In short, he was the highest-ranking US official in Russia.

George's mother Anne loved balls, sightseeing, and sporting events. She is reported to have played badminton and to have ridden very well. Probably she met her future husband during one of the splendid equestrian events held by the Tsar. Anne was a vivid, nonconformist lady.

George has two elder sisters, Helen and betty. The life of the children was filled with distraction. Until the beginning of the first world war in 1914 journeys led the family in the winter time to their estate Nawwast (Estonia); to Bad Reichenhall (Germany) and to Cannes (France) which impressed him very much. Most summers were spent in Nawwast. In some summers, they also undertook greater journeys: to Bad Kreuznach (Germany), St. Moritz (Switzerland) and to Italy (Florence, Rome, Sorrento, Mount Vesuvius).

In the age of 11, he visits Berlin several times and is deeply impressed by the classical sculptures he comes to see. Another reason to go to Berlin is to visit the dentist (!). Paris is also visited regularly to buy clothes.

Some words to the family estate Nawwast in Estonia (the ruins of which some of us will visit this summer during the Huene trip to Estonia): The residence was splendid (with a big tower) and spacious. It had extensive facilities, such as a village for the servants, a bakery, a sawmill, a sauna, silos and barns, a smithy and sheds for American agricultural equipment. In the stables, there were superb horses donated by the Tsar because of his gratitude to George's father. The estate also boasted a great collection of carriages from Russia, England, France, and America.

Around the residence, there were all kinds of parks. Even fir trees imported from Canada were planted there. There were lawns for tennis and croquet. A genre painted accompanied the family to Nawwast from time to time. Every summer, George's mother organized a party for the peasant children. According to George, his parents were concerned for the peasants in his charge. For example, Barthold built model farm houses for them he was proud on.

This, as well as the description of the residence, can be considered as typical for the life of our ancestors in Estonia and Latvia.

Childhood is however not only sweet for George. Apart from an unaffected father, his mother was occupied more and more by his two sisters and their social calendar. He notes: "My mother devoted her entire existence to the girls' life ... and (I only saw her) on rare occasions." Such occasions were the evenings of important balls when his sisters showed their pretty clothes to George - the first intense impression fashion made on him. He notes: "I was always impressed by the beautiful dresses they wore and the light smell of eau-de-Cologne and powder." The main interest of his mother was that her son would lead a social life corresponding to their standing. Let's listen to George again: "Sunday chores meant getting al dressed up in sailor suits with knickers and black stockings and pumps and going to some house or palace and being put through the routine of minuets, gavottes, waltzes, mazurkas, and the contradance." In this respect, his memories rather sound painful than enthousiastic.

George does not feel very comfortable in St. Petersburg. He hates the long, cold winters with short days and gray skies. On the other hand, their town residence near the Winter Palace was splendid and the court pomp could almost be smelled. George was always impressed by the well-dressed ladies stepping out from their carriages in front of Fabergé. He loved the brief but intense northern summer.

As puts it William A. Ewing, the author of the most important book on George, "And so a portrait sketch of Huene begins to emerge: of a sensitive, affectionate, and dutiful child, eager to prove his worthiness to his parents but saddened by his mother's preoccupation and deeply wounded by his fathers indifference."

George does not adore school: "I was a visual person, I was very backwards in school." He visited first a Lutheran school and than the Imperial Lyceum where Puschkin had studied. Due to his mother's origins, he starts to learn English in the age of three (the language at home being German. He starts to learn French in the age of 14. No doubt that his Russian was perfect. His best teachers were friends of the family, like a curator at the Hermitage, and relatives. They introduced the boy to the classical ideals (balance, nobility, harmony) that became of special importance to him, and the Renaissance artists. He sometimes made reference to Renaissance paintings in his photographs or included classical sculptures. He loved ballet and the opera and became fond of painting and studying paintings. He expanded his knowledge to the classical antique to the Greek and Roman history (mind his journeys to Italy)."

His sisters becoming older, George's mother gets more and more occupied by engaging them properly and this kind of things. Therefore, young men are installed for George's education. It is through them that George gets first exposed to ideas of radical social changes. In contrast to what might be expected, George appears to have accepted these ideas. He states "These tutors opened my eyes. It was a secret world which the young socialist students and I shared, and a secret world which I treasured because of the faith and confidence they inspired in me." Ewing suspects that these ideas "were a welcome substitute for the rigid world-view of his father's caste." This "caste" did not take the socialist threat for serious. Some of these tutors gave him the love and friendship his father lacked.

World War and Russian Revolution

In 1914, the first world war started. Consequently, George's father, who remained in St. Petersburg, sent over his wife and children to Yalta on the Black Sea which he regarded as a safe place. The family purchased a house there and he went on the local high school.

In 1916, Rasputin who had an evil influence on the Tsar family was murdered by friends of the family which was one of the rare occasions that George and his father had common ground for satisfaction. While his father hoped that the regime would be stronger afterwards, George hoped for social reforms as a result, however. Both were also satisfied with the abdiction of the Tsar in 1917. George in hope for democracy, his father in hope for a more competent military supreme command. The Bolsheviks consolidate their power and the Great Civil War begins with the revolt of the Don Cossacks.

In the following months, it became less safe in Yalta: his mother was suspicious to be a possible spy, especially after she had been seen visiting the Dowager Empress, sister of Britain's queen Alexandra. Consequently, the family was briefly placed under house arrest.

In spite of being in favor of socialist reform, George realized the danger they faced as a noble family. He convinced his mother to flee. He comments on this internal conflict "Although I felt very deeply that I had no affinity with the social setup into which I was born, I lacked the burning passion to become a revolutionary." While his sisters remain in Russia, he and his mother escape by land through Scandinavia to London. In 1918, after having be ordered by the Bolsheviks to leave his estate with only one valise, his father followed them in the last minute, disguised as a peasant. Everything of value was lost and remained in St. Petersburg, Yalta, and Nawwast. They had, however, financial funds outside Russia that kept them secure.

The family settled briefly in London and George was sent to school in Surrey: "I had to learn everything all over again". Sister Betty flees to France.

George joins a British Expeditionary Force that Churchill sends over to Russia to fight the Bolsheviks. He is convinced that the Bolsheviks have betrayed the spirit of the revolution and wants to help to improve the situation at home. After some idle time, they confronted a dominating army led by Stalin himself near the later Stalingrad. They saw the horror of modern war, a Typhus epidemic broke out. George soon got Typhus and came close to death several times the following weeks. After one year of action, defeat and shattered illusions, he returned to his parents. By that time, he was almost aged 18. In 1918, his sister Helen escapes from Yalta and joins the family.

Paris - Capital of Fashion

While George was fighting in Russia, his parents had moved to Biarritz, an exquisite sea resort in southern France. George, however, would have preferred to start life over in the US: "After all, I was one-half American!". Besides, he wanted to leave his father who, like many others, could not stand the social revolution and the loss of their home. According to George, for his father "Life was reduced to bitterness, having lost the two things he loved most in life - his estate and his horses".

George moved to Paris. He started with working in a number of odd jobs, such as translator of an American firm with lumber interests in Poland. For them, he traveled through Poland and was impressed by the countryside and the primitive peasant villages. Back in Paris, he entered the cultural life and could not get enough of the new art of cinema. He jobbed in film studios where the art of lighting impressed him deeply. He did, however, not intend to become an actor.

He started to work of an artist - his first order came from his sister Betty who had moved to France in 1917. She had opened a dressmaking business, named Yteb. She offered George her attic as living quarters in return for art work she needed for promotion. He loved to draw and accepted happily. He did catalog sketches, greeting cards, invitations of all kinds - in short what we today call Public Relations and Graphics Design. In order to further improve his drawing skills, he settled on to the studio of André Lhote, famous cubist painter and teacher (he also taught Henri Cartier-Bresson and Pavel Tchelitchev). One outcoming of Lhote's influence was a cubist Y-shaped logo for Yteb.

Additionally to the Yteb work, he started to precisely copy designer dresses for a "pirate" manufacturer , i.e. he went to the presentations of the collections of well-known designers, had to recall all the details and sketched the cloth back in the office. He soon started to sell his drawings to famous fashion journals such as "Harper's Bazaar", "Women's Wear" and "Le Jardin des Modes".

George became a close friend of the American Man Ray, living in Paris from 1921 to 1940. He was one of the first important photographers, Dadaist, Surrealist. George and Man Ray jointly worked on the project to take photos of, according to George "the most beautiful women in Paris". It was Man Ray who took the photos and George who supplied the sitters, the props, and the backgrounds. The American-born fashion editor of the famous "Vogue" fashion journal, Main Bocher (who became later well-known as the couturier Mainbocher) saw and appreciated the photographs, especially as one of the ladies was the Baroness Eugènie de Rothschild. Vogue only wanted this single picture, but Man Ray and George did not accept and, instead, they sold the entire portfolio to a New England department store. Main Bocher was, nevertheless, impressed and arranged an interview of George with Mrs. Chase, Vogue's editor-in-chief. He was offered an exclusive contract for his illustration work which George describes as his first "real job". When Vogue opened ist first photographic studio, George was asked to design backdrops for the photographers and to rend them assistance in general. George shared with Main Bocher the conviction that photography would be very promising for Vogue. He tried to urge Bocher to hire his friend Man Ray as a photographer. Bocher, however, decided that George himself might be the better choice due to his eye for detail, drive and enthusiasm. One day, the Vogue photographer did not show up so that George was asked by Bocher to take the photos himself. As they were published full-page in the subsequent issue of Vogue which can be regarded as the start of his career as a photographer (this happens in 1926). George who was not entirely satisfied with continuing his illustration work some time before, commented on this "My fashion illustrations were improving but somehow I was temperamentally unsuited to this work. I disliked sedentary activities. In the back of my mind I was veering toward another medium. Now the die was cast. It was sink or swim. I had plunged into a new world utterly unknown for me."

He started to additionally do photos for Vogue's US sister publication "Vanity Fair" in 1927 and in 1928, his photographs were the first time shown on a Paris exhibition.

In these early days of photography, he was not only confronted with artistic considerations, but with technical problems of all kind. On the artistic side, "I asked myself over and over", explains George, "how would I represent the modern woman in the true light of the period?". This was one of the predominant questions he tackled in a way that made him famous. One of his famous photographs shows one woman helping another getting out of a car, another shows a woman concentrated steering a racing car which was in contrast of the classical role patterns.

In order to find the answer to this question and out of a deep drive to find his own ideals, he becomes part of the artistic milieu of 1920s Paris and its cafés.

He came to know and appreciate very different persons: from Cubist and Dadaist painters like Tchelitchev (cf. http://twinpalms.com/backlist/manandhorse.html) and Bérard, who were both close friends of him, to the legendary model of the greatest painters, Kiki de Montparnasse, the famous film director Jean Renoir as well as the musical and film director and composer Erik Charell, the designer Paul Poiret and the eastern mystic George I. Gurdjieff.

He got acquainted to the painters Joan Miró, Salvador Dali, and André Dérain and occasionally collaborated with them.

George was never absorbed by one single trend or style but stayed in close relationship with artists of such diverse circles as the Dadaists, Expressionists, Romantics, and Neo-romantics. Based on his sound education, he was looking for useful ideas to integrate. His standing as Vogue photographer allowed him to be accepted in all kind of society.

Especially admired women and friends in this time were

• the Russian princess and film actress Natalie Paley (the femme fatale Jean Cocteau wanted to marry but she preferred the Broadway) and her half-sister, the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna (see http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/mariepavlovna.html);
• the charming social hostess, Marie-Louise Bousquet (among frequent visitors of her salons were Ernest Hemingway and Yves Saint-Laurent);
• the nightclub sensation of the roaring twenties, Josephine Baker (he took an excellent photograph of her that could be seen in last year's retrospective "100 years of American art" in New York's Whitney Museum and on http://www.cmgww.com/stars/baker/baker.html)
• the singer, stripper and painters' model Suzy Solidor (who performed private readings of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and other poets), cf. http://www.his.com/~crawford/suzy.htm
• and - last but not least - the famous fashion designer Coco Chanel. For George, she was the best couturière. She was a good friend of George who liked to cite her remark "L'élégance, c'est moi", cf. http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/topics/infoart/chanel/ , http://www.javaslublu.com/CocoChanel.html

The most important person to George, however, became a young German, Horst P. Horst.

Influenced by the German Bauhaus school of architecture, the young German (born in 1906) came to Paris in 1930 and started to work with Le Corbusier. He was, however, deceived by the project he worked on as well as by the person of the famous architect. In one of Paris cafés, he met George and they seem to have mutually liked and appreciated each other right from the beginning. In the same year, Horst P. Horst (at that time, he still had his original family name Bohrmann), started to work as an studio artist and model for George. The latter resulted in some of George's best photographs.

The most famous of them is Swim wear by Izod, 1930 (depicted in http://www.aidan.co.uk/ss/i/1.html and in: http://artline.com/associations/ipa/show/show99/exhibitors/wise/wise.html). This classical photograph, like some others he did, has already been copied by some advertisements for perfume or fashion. The mood found in this and other of George's beachwear photographs also inspired Picasso for some of his cubist pictures, for example "Seated Bather" which is depited in http://www.openedge.com.au/pp11.htm

Another Picasso picture which might also be inspired by George's beachwear work is shown in http://www.club-internet.fr:80/picasso/tableaux/women1/371.html

An early photograph of George's beachwear series (1928) where Horst poses as well is depicted in: http://www.berwald-oriental.com/Magazine/reviews/kachur/kachur1-28-15.asp

George became Horst's mentor. They undertook several journeys together and George let him take the camera himself more and more, especially while being away from the office for assignments like for Vogue's sister publication "Vanity Fair" in Hollywood. George introduced him to many important artists of the period. In 1935, Horst took over George's job at Vogue when George started to work full-time for Harper's Bazaar after Horst dispute with the Vogue editors (the relationship was already difficult at that time as George required quite a lot of freedom for traveling etc. which the Vogue editor would no longer accept). Horst died last November. The French journal "Le Monde" wrote on the 25th of November 1999 how important it was for him to have met George: In this time, the number of exhibitions and books on photography multiplied due to increasing public interest and George was one of the important participants of this success.

Besides, women' fashion had changed after World War I, due to the introduction of new synthetics like artificial silk, together with new forms of mass production, and the tendency towards more functional and less restrictive garments. This meant, that the woman's actual structure draw more attention than before which was documented and promoted by George's photographs. This went to the extreme in form of the short skirt introduced in 1925. Besides, a more boyish attitude started with girls cutting off their hair and wearing cylindrically shaped skirts, looking almost like trousers. The trend was promote to sweep back in the end of the Twenties towards the long evening suit, as shirt producers saw their earnings diminish.

Even for those who couldn't afford the clothes they bought their images which led to increased production figures of Vogue and similar fashion journals.

This acquaintance revolutionary altered the life of Horst and forged his sense of beauty. Hoyningen-Huene used the athletic figure of his assistant for the publicity of a bath suit (see above). Sitting on a pontoon facing the sea, together with a female mannequin, he turns his back towards the objective. Keen setting? 'That's not the point. It was rather keen to pose in a bath suit! Few mannequins would have accepted, and magazines hesitated to publish such pictures. This is why Huene let us turn the head away from the camera, says Horst."

For more details on Horst, who became one of the most famous fashion photographs himself see http://www.horstphorst.com/new/home/background/background.html

George worked together with other great photographers like Edward Steichen, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Paul Outerbridge.

Apart from photography, George did the lightning for several theaters, bistros, and bars at that time. He also received an offer to collaborate in film directing by the famous director Jean Cocteau. Both became close friends, but George refused the offer because if he turned a film, it had to be his film (he turned some short films later on most of which are no longer known to exist). He also held some famous parties.

In the early thirties, neoclassicism became more and more popular. George appreciated and shared this trend as the foundations of his appreciation of the antique were laid in his childhood. These were the years when the impressive success of highly appreciated Coco Chanel, Madeleine Vionnet (see http://www.vionnet.com/creator.html), and Alix Barton, the later Madame Grès (see http://www.costumeinstitute.org/madamegr.htm) started.

In these years, George also published photographs on classical greek architecture. He also visits Africa, South-East Asia and Australia.

Just to make things clear, not much is known about George's private life. It seems that he was homosexual and tried to keep it secret. Therefore, the good relationship he had with some famous actresses etc. should not be misunderstood as affairs...

[ Click Here to read Part II ]

Copyright © 2001 Martin von Hoyningen-Huene