Herbert List Photograph of Aristide Maillol Signed, 9 3/4 x 7 3/4" image, 10 x 8 paper, 20 x 16" overall
In 1929 he met Andreas Feininger who inspired his greater interest in photography and gave him a Rolleiflex camera. From 1930 he began taking portraits of friends and shooting still life; was influenced by the Bauhaus and artists of the surrealist movements, Man Ray, Giorgio De Chirico and Max Ernst; and created a surrealist photograph titled Metaphysique in a style he called fotografia metafisica in homage to De Chirico, his most important influence during this period.
List used male models, draped fabric, masks and double-exposures to depict dream states and fantastic imagery. He has explained that his photos were "composed visions where [my] arrangements try to capture the magical essence inhabiting and animating the world of appearances."
While there are surface similarities to Nazi imagery of the athletic male body—that of Leni Riefenstahl for example—unlike them, List's pictures of friends are portraits as much as they are nudes, nor did List endorse Nazi ideas, nor did his work influence National Socialist photography. He never published his male nudes in his own lifetime, and kept them hidden in his mother's house in a sack he called his 'poison bag'. He was however influenced in his depiction of romantic paganism by the Jugendbewegung youth and physical health movement, though he did not join any of its associations, and some of the ideals of the Jugendbewegung were co-opted by the Nazis (though they later denounced the movement) and influenced their idealising Romantic realism.List in his own notes uses a pun—"Das Objektiv ist nicht objectiv,"—to emphasise his creative, non-realist, application of photography: "The lens is not objective. Otherwise photography would be useless as an artistic medium."
In 1936, in response to the danger of Gestapo attention to his openly gay lifestyle and his Jewish heritage, List left Germany for Paris, where he met George Hoyningen-Huene with whom he travelled to Greece, deciding then to become a photographer. During 1937 he worked in a studio in London and held his first one-man show at Galerie du Chasseur d'Images in Paris in a show reviewed by G. Brunon Guardia for l'Intransigeant;
This photographer, having perfected a method based on the geometric laws of composition and the interplay of contrasts, applies to it all a Germanic rigour. The choice of his subjects, the pose of the model, the placement of the object, deliberately artificial, contribute to the coldness of the results. But we are in front of work that is a superb demonstration. The staging is always remarkable in itself except for the facile Hoffmannesque use of wax dolls and masks, but this distant monument which is really part of a bicycle placed in the foreground, or these shells taken at point-blank range on sand in front of a mirror that reflects the dunes, are worth stopping for. Even in the less commendable equivocation of certain nudes, Herbert List shows himself to be an ingenious director, and a faithful interpreter. There is therefore, for gifted amateurs and for many professionals, much to draw from these excellent lessons, even if it means returning later to more soulful expressions.
Hoyningen-Huene referred him to Harper's Bazaar magazine, and 1936–39 he worked for Arts et Metiers Graphiques, Verve, Vogue, Photographie, Life and lesser publications including La Belle France.[10] List was unsatisfied with fashion photography. He turned back to still life imagery, continuing in his fotografia metafisica style.
From 1937 to 1939 List traveled in Greece and took photographs of ancient temples, ruins, sculptures, and the landscape for his book Licht über Hellas. In the meantime he supported himself with work for magazines Neue Linie, Die Dame and for the press from 1940 to 1943, and with portraits which he continued to make until 1950.[2] In List's work the revolutionary tactics of surrealist art and a metaphysical staging of irony and reverie had been honed in on the fashion industry that relied on illusion and spectacle which after World War II returned to a classical fixation on ruins, broken male statuary and antiquity.

20 x 16 x 1 in

10 lb