Lillian Bassman

Edwynn Houk Gallery presents an online viewing room devoted to works by Lillian Bassman, celebrating her central role in twentieth-century photographic modernism. Emerging from Harper’s Bazaar in the 1940s and 50s, Bassman transformed fashion photography into a language of abstraction and atmosphere, reducing garments to luminous silhouettes and reworking her prints in the darkroom until they hovered between drawing and photograph. Her images brought abstraction, intimacy, and modernist rigor onto the pages of the American newsstand, expanding the space available to women both behind and in front of the camera.

Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 2 – July 26, 2026.

In the years after the Second World War, as Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists established New York as the capital of modern art, Lillian Bassman emerged among a new generation of photographers who revitalized their field. Alongside Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, she was a protégé of the legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch, working within the charged atmosphere of Harper’s Bazaar in the 1940s and 50s. One of the first women to hold a salaried art direction role at the magazine, Bassman helped shape its visual language from within a largely male editorial culture.

Cover designs for Harper’s Bazaar, 1949 by Lillian Bassman (unpublished).
Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Alongside Avedon and Penn, Bassman brought a new look to the pages of Harper’s Bazaar. Their photographs moved away from tidy studio poses and the careful display of accessories, turning instead to the spirit of the postwar woman. Bassman met the modern woman where she was: active, independent, and on the go.

 “It’s magical what she does,” Avedon said of Bassman's bold experimentation.

In the early 1990s, Helen Frankenthaler returned a bag of old negatives that had been stored in the Manhattan carriage house she rented from Bassman. The rediscovery prompted Bassman to revisit some of her most important photographs from the late 1940s and 1950s, printing them again in a markedly different way.

“I was interested in creating a new kind of vision aside from what the camera saw,” she said.

In the darkroom she softened and altered the images, printing through tissue and gauze and using ferrocyanide bleach to lighten certain areas. Rather than accepting the fixed look of the original negatives, she treated them as starting points, shaping the final image more freely. The new prints — which she called “reinterpretations” — gave her earlier fashion photographs a presence that felt both unmistakably contemporary and timeless.