Austere, Magnificent

1956 Herbert Matter photo for Vogue on Andy Stott’s 2014 album, Faith in Strangers

In 2014 Herbert Matter’s magnificent photograph of Modigliani’s 1911-12 sculpture Head of a Woman was used for the cover of Andy Stott’s fifth album, Faith in Strangers.

Matter had photographed the sculpture, perched on a radiator in front of a window looking out onto Grand Army Plaza in Manhattan, for a 1956 Vogue Magazine feature on banker/art collector Chester Dale. The photo was made in color, but ran in black & white, and extremely cropped. So Stott’s version is the most magnificent it’s ever looked.

The photo’s caption read, “A Modigliani head, austere, magnificent.” Somehow the next spread in the magazine shows Mrs. Charles Wrightsman: “With her husband, she also collects eighteenth-century French furniture, which they use, magnificently, in their house in Palm Beach, set on the sea’s edge.” In Condé Nast style, then, I have gone back and replaced two lesser words with magnificent.

via @hologramparade via @caravan-dynamics via @wildoute