The Man Who Shot Beautiful Women

BELL TOLLS

It was on a hot afternoon in Rome.

And I know that he was on heart tablets

and, for some reason, he apparently did not take those pills.

He forced this heart attack on himself.

Photographer Erwin Blumenfeld is thought to have deliberately

run up and down Rome's Spanish Steps in the searing heat.

He didn't want to be taken to hospital,

and he gradually seemed to lose his breath.

It was almost as if he choked to death.

It was clear that this was something he had planned

and didn't want to be revived.

It was a suicide, I believe, yes.

He knew what he was doing, why he was doing it.

After his mysterious death,

the man who was once the most highly paid photographer in the world

left behind a cache of famously iconic images -

The Doe Eye,

The Girl On The Eiffel Tower,

The Girl Behind Wet Silk...

..and Grace Kelly framed in gold.

What makes Erwin Blumenfeld stand out for me, as a photographer,

is his amazing ability to create imagery,

that when I look at it now, all this time later, 60, 70 years later,

I look at it, and I go, "I wish I'd done that.

"I wish I'd taken that."

Erwin Blumenfeld's obsession

was with beautiful women.

He had a way of expressing desire,

and it's amorphous,

you know, it's not specific,

it's a kind of yearning.

You sense this woman obsession behind the pictures.

The women seem alive.

But his fetish for beauty led to a complicated private life

that would threaten his artistic reputation.

There were various women,

there were jealousies, rivalries,

there were complexities.

The women in Blumenfeld's life failed to work together

to curate his legacy -

30,000 negatives, 8,000 black-and-white prints,

and dozens of fashion films.

To this day, much of his work has never been seen by the public.

This is the family legacy -

destroy, destruct, separate and divide.

At the peak of his career,

he took hundreds of covers for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.

So what happened to Erwin Blumenfeld?

Blumenfeld's rise to photographic stardom has been meteoric.

He has startled the photographic world with his achievements

and innovations.

In 1935, he was the proprietor of a leather goods store in Amsterdam,

and in just nine years, without benefit of formal instruction,

this unknown amateur has become the world's most famous

and most highly-paid professional photographer.

Today, his work leads the field.

In 1941, Erwin Blumenfeld, a German Jew escaping from the Nazis,

arrived with his family in New York with one suitcase.

Already 44 years old,

he had not yet earned a living as a professional photographer.

Yet, he would soon be shaping the way America saw itself.

He defined the way that we think of the '40s and '50s.

Not necessarily how the '40s and '50s looked, but how we think it looked.

And I think that that's what makes him a great photographer,

because if you define an age, visually, for the rest of time,

then you've created something amazing.

The USA in the post-war years felt it was on top of the world -

and who better to define what it meant to be an American,

than an emigre who described himself as "un-American for ever"?

He brought an outsider's eye and the sensibility of a European artist.

He's not constrained by his commercial role.

There's an absolutely brilliant Vogue cover -

he's cut out the shadow underneath a hat, to make something

which looks like the military beret,

and the lipstick is simply a dash of bright purple colour

added on to a black-and-white print.

Have a look at something which is as expressive as you can be

and still have your art directors

allow it to go forward.

Blumenfeld always referred to art directors as "arse" directors,

yet despite his contempt for them, such was his talent,

that for 20 years, they kept coming back for more.

They respond to quality, right?

So Blumenfeld consistently delivered.

He had a unique voice and vision in his photography

that other photographers, his contemporaries, didn't have.

# I'd love to gain complete control of you

# And handle even the heart and soul of you

# So love at least a small percent of me, do

# For I love all of you. #

Surrounded by the beautiful women he photographed,

with a Manhattan apartment and a beach house in the Hamptons,

he could hardly believe his luck.

Blumenfeld had quite simply re-invented the fashion shoot

by understanding it was about creating icons.

This here is arguably not only Blumenfeld's best cover,

but one of the most iconic covers in Vogue's history.

My eye and my mole, which is

on the right side of my face,

is my trademark.

It's practically the only way my mother can recognise me!

-Listen, Ed, I have something to show you.

-Good.

Look what someone has commercialised...

-Pyjamas!

-Yes,

the pyjamas with the eye and the mouth.

'It was kind of like the advent of a new age.

'It was a really important time,

'and they'd chosen him to take this photograph, and it had a surrealist

'quality to it, but at the same time it really was a beauty image.'

And, as a beauty image, it's been ripped off and copied by

so many other photographers through time.

I wanted to take that picture which you see so many times,

done by so many people in so many different ways, shapes and forms,

and say, "What if that picture came alive?"

# I get high on a buzz, then a rush When I'm plugged in you... #

He completely changed the rules of photography

and opened it up to what it is today for many, many photographers.

I think one of the main things that he did for photography,

that lasts to today, is the fact that he took the rulebook

and he threw it firmly out of the window.

Here's a classic Blumenfeld. I mean, look at all that white space.

You'd never see that on a magazine cover now.

Very simple headlines and cover lines, simple image,

beautiful use of colour, that's a classic look from him.

Throughout the '40s and '50s, his double-height studio

at 222 Central Park South was where he shot and later hand-printed

the thousands of covers and advertisements that made his name.

It was here that Blumenfeld courted not one but two cosmetic queens -

Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein.

He would shoot campaigns for both of them.

Bette Davis posed for him, so did Lucille Ball.

By the time Marlene Dietrich met Blumenfeld,

her stardom was tarnished.

She hoped that having Blumenfeld take her portrait

might help her career as it had others.

It didn't work.

This early image of a 23-year-old Audrey Hepburn

was shot in 1952.

Grace Kelly came into Blumenfeld's studio

the year she filmed To Catch A Thief.

Movie stars, singers, society ladies and top models

all wanted to be shot by him.

I use a trick to soften the mother's face

just before photographing her.

I ask her, "Will you marry me?"

It's the one formula that makes the American female tick.

# The look of love

# Is in your eyes

# The look your smile can disguise

# The look of love

# Is saying so much more than these words could ever say... #

But even in his hey-day, Blumenfeld was never seduced by fame.

His pre-occupation was always with what was going on

under the surface.

It was multifaceted.

Some of it was very, very beautiful,

and I guess he was trying to create his perfect woman, his ideal woman

in certain times, and in some ways, it was very, very, very dark.

If this was a man, he would look really threatening.

I mean, this woman looks dangerous. You know, she looks really strong.

She's smiling, but her eyes are that of a demon tiger or

a demon panther, and she looks like you should avoid her at all costs.

He talked about psychological portraiture at one point.

He used that phrase, psychological portraiture,

as a way of uncovering the reality under the surface.

And I think that's what, really, we have to deal with here.

It was about women, largely. It was an obsession with women.

He says, several times,

"I could never really love a single woman, I loved women."

I did uncover, in my research, this amazing negative of him

giving birth to a woman.

He is in the birthing position

and this mannequin is arriving in the world.

Some of Blumenfeld's most memorable psychological portraits are of

himself - a sitter with whom he had the most complex of relationships.

For all his life, he remembered someone telling him

as a very young person that he was ugly, and that upset him.

I thought he looked lovely, but that maybe my prejudice.

Even today, I remain convinced there's a life in another world

going on behind the transparent glass. We are doubles.

Without the mirror, I would never have become a human being.

Only fools call it a narcissist complex.

No mirror, no art, no echo, no music.

It's clear from the self portraits that he many times

photographed himself with masks, with paper bags on his head,

with screens in front of his face, with photographic masking,

if it wasn't physical masking.

He often photographed himself,

and I have a feeling that there is a lifelong search

in the self portraits

to battle out the things that he could not battle out

working for commercial clients.

He was dealing with the complexity of his identity,

in such a vulnerable way.

People shy away from that kind of

psychological aspect,

or did during that period.

Even at the very height of Blumenfeld's career in New York,

the demons that haunted him were never far away.

Blumenfeld's complexity as an artist can be traced back

to his earliest childhood in Berlin.

Whatever the precise details on 5 May 1896 at the midnight hour,

I was unceremoniously thrust into my first concentration camp -

doubled up and tethered in solitary confinement for nine months

and condemned to death under the most inhumane living conditions.

I began learning how to die.

I think to be a Berlin Jew says a lot of things.

Berlin at the end of the 19th century,

beginning of the 20th century, is a melting pot,

is like an exuberant place, there's lots of artists,

lots of things going on, and being a Jew in Berlin,

as the history will show us later in time, it's never an easy thing.

You're always the marginal, always an outsider.

There was always a lot of anti-Semitism,

but there was a very big Jewish population in Berlin.

For instance, the whole cloth trade was in Jewish hands,

as was Erwin Blumenthal's father, who was an umbrella producer.

He grew up in a middle-class home, where the artistic influences

reflected the cultural changes in Berlin at the time.

What drove me to the arts?

Sex drove me.

I drew my first visual stimulation from Papa's satirical magazines.

My auto-erotic programme was determined by the weekly appearance

of the charms of the same demimondaines in lace panties.

At the same time, I was being prepared for my career

in the women's garment trade.

Blumenfeld's fascination with the possibility of photography

went back to his childhood years,

when, aged ten, a generous uncle gave him his first camera.

Aged 13, he would take this self-portrait as Pierrot,

using a mirror to obtain both front and profile views.

He would develop his own photographs in the bathroom

and he also used quite a few of his early photographs,

very early photographs, in his early collage.

But Blumenfeld's early experiments in photographic collages

were interrupted by world events.

'Some of these men will stay four years in this earth,

'many will remain here for ever.'

At the outbreak of the First World War, Erwin Blumenfeld

drove an ambulance for the German Army,

despite not ever having learned to drive.

One of his duties involved keeping a ledger in a field brothel,

run by the German army.

He found the war horrific,

but another threat lay much closer to home.

When Erwin Blumenfeld leaked to his mother that he wanted to

desert from the Army, from war, in 1918, she immediately

contacted her brother, who was a German nationalist,

and her brother reported him to the police,

which could have meant his death.

Fortunately, they couldn't find any proof of the fact

that he wanted to desert from the Army,

and so he had to go back to war in the north of France.

But she said, "Better to have a dead child than a traitor."

Before the war was over, Blumenfeld would be awarded an Iron Cross,

though not, in his case, for valour.

His company commander wanted to learn French, and my father was

able to teach him the fundamentals of the French language,

and this is why he got an Iron Cross, which he was very proud of

because he thought it was so ridiculous.

Having eventually deserted from the German army -

without his mother's knowledge -

Blumenfeld would be told that his brother and best friend, Heinz,

had been killed in battle, aged 19.

With the life he had known in Berlin destroyed by war,

Blumenfeld found himself drawn to the avant-garde artists

who were congregating in the city.

One night, I went in mellow mood to the urinal on Potsdamer Platz.

A young dandy came in by the opposite entrance, stood beside me,

fixed his monocle in his eye and, in one fell swoop,

pissed my profile on the wall so masterfully

that I could not but cry out in admiration.

We became great friends.

He was the most brilliant and man I ever met in all my life.

A great raconteur and an immensely powerful draughtsmen.

It was George Grosz.

George Grosz was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada group

during the Weimar Republic,

best known for his savage caricatures

of German life in the 1920s.

The two were to become fast friends.

For many years, these early Dada collages that Blumenfeld made

were kept hidden from public view.

He emerged out of that post- First World War moment

when Dadaism crystallised -

highly politicised, artists, anarchists,

they kind of tend to be one and the same,

questioning, challenging what society was,

what it should be. He responded to that through his work,

which involved photographic collages,

reinventing how one might piece together a photograph

that was also a political statement.

Looking at the body of collages from 1916 to 1933,

I consider them to be very important.

You can read his collage a bit like you can read a book.

Could be also like a book cover or like a magazine cover,

and it's quite extraordinary to think that some of them look like

magazine covers and, later on, he did these hundreds of covers for Vogue.

# I found my new love

# He's got the intellect Yes, he's got the mind of

# A great philosopher or artist

# So sure of his place in history

# He's a mystery

# La-da-da La-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. #

Blumenfeld continued experimenting with his collage at a time

long before photography was even accepted as an art form.

Thinking back to the situation of photography in the 1920s,

I think it would probably be true to say

that most professional photographers were really glorified tradesmen.

It was hardly a profession that attracted somebody

of high artistic ambition

or with a powerful desire to express themselves.

What I really wanted to be was a photographer, pure and simple,

dedicated to his art for art's sake alone.

A denizen of the new world,

as the American Jew, Man Ray, had triumphantly discovered.

# Maybe one day he'll meet me

# And I just know that I'll be tempted completely

# How could I ever let him know my devotion?

# It's such a shame

# He knows how to do everything

# But love me. #

As a young man, Erwin Blumenfeld felt very alone in the world.

He'd begun writing letters to a Dutch girl

who was the cousin of a friend.

Her name was Lena Citroen. They shared their deepest secrets.

By the time the pair finally met in Amsterdam,

they were already in love, and soon became engaged.

They were extremely close, I think, during those years,

on a whole range of levels.

She was very interested in psychology and her interests are to start

reading Freud and that had a tremendous impact on him.

In terms of literature, she was a very literate person

and he loved reading, and so there was that communion between them

at a literary level as well.

# I saw the splendour of the moonlight

# On Honolulu Bay. #

In 1920, Erwin Blumenfeld -

occasional painter, avid photographer and Dadaist -

moved to Amsterdam to be with Lena, who he married.

Two years later, with a baby daughter to feed,

he decided to go into business selling handbags.

He was now the unlikely proprietor of a leather goods store.

# If you like a ukelele lady... #

A surprise discovery above the store

was to change the entire course of Blumenfeld's life.

When he discovered a dark room on the second floor

of the Fox Leather Company, he decided to try to see

if he could take pictures of some of the attractive women who came in,

and then would put the images in the window shop,

and that would attract other women, not only to the leather goods

but also to the photographs, and so pretty soon the photographs are

more popular than the leather goods, and that's how things developed.

Only gradually did he shift it to taking more relaxed poses,

and eventually he did some nudes as well.

I think my mother didn't mind at all, him taking pictures of nude women.

# Sometimes when you talk

# Mmm...

# And I'm your Betty Blue and we're singing it close

# Like...

# The girls in Belleville Rendez-Vouz

# I wish...

# That we...

# Could somehow freeze the frame

# But this isn't the silver screen

# No... #

He wasn't just interested

in making beautiful pictures of beautiful women,

I think he was always trying to get beyond.

Those pictures are really quite amazing.

They don't date. It's because they're not objectified.

It's because obviously he was interested in them

as complex social beings.

I won't say just women, but as complex social beings.

In Amsterdam, he shot a photograph of a very black man

with a very, very white woman.

In 1942, Blumenfeld would shoot the Native American actress

Burnu Acquanetta in Life Magazine.

Later, in 1958, he would photograph Bani Yelverton,

the first black model to participate in an American fashion show.

He was instructed to place her on the far right of the fold-out

so she could be easily removed or torn out of the magazine

by readers who reacted badly to this kind of audacity.

In Amsterdam in 1936, Blumenfeld's leather store

went out of business, but not before he took one key portrait.

The sitter was Genevieve Rouault.

Genevieve was a Paris dentist,

and the daughter of a well-known painter, George Rouault.

She offered to exhibit Blumenfeld's photographs in her Paris

waiting room, and promised to introduce him to famous sitters,

such as her artist father and his friend, Henri Matisse.

Blumenfeld left Holland and took a train to Paris

with the aim of becoming a professional photographer.

With money lent to Blumenfeld by a family friend,

he rented a studio here at 9 rue Delambre.

When Genevieve Rouault let him have a show in her waiting room,

he didn't make any money off of it. People would...

Matisse said, "You can come to my studio and I'll give you a picture

"and you give me a picture,"

and then Matisse chose this portrait that Blumenfeld had taken of him

and kept one and then he said, "Which one of mine do you like?"

and Blumenfeld picked some drawing and was thrilled to death,

and then Matisse said, "Yes, I agree," and put it in his drawer.

He didn't pay for the portrait and nobody paid Blumenfeld in those days.

But he was making his name as best he could.

And Blumenfeld was finally published.

The first editions of Verve Magazine

showcased 17 groundbreaking photographs by Erwin Blumenfeld.

Double exposures, triple exposures, done in the camera,

done in the dark room, solarisations, high-contrast printing.

We know he didn't respect rules.

He was very proud of saying if the instruction for the new film

said "never heat it more than above room temperature," he would boil it.

If it said "never let it go below room temperature,"

he'd throw it in the freezer,

and then you'd get these strange effects on the surface.

Kind of reticulation, granular structures, sort of liquid feels.

These vintage black-and-white prints from the '30s

are what he considered to be his best work.

Many of these are the pictures that he chose for his book,

My Hundred Best Photographs.

In 1938, Blumenfeld's Paris studio received a chance visit

from a stranger cloaked in black.

Cecil Beaton, the British photographer,

had seen Erwin Blumenfeld's early experimental pictures in Verve,

and was impressed by their originality.

He wanted to meet their maker.

Here, at last, is someone who is not in any influenced

by the work of other photographers.

Here is a fresh and clear mind.

It seemed to be wrong and disgraceful

that his photographs never fetched much money.

That, with two children to support, he should remain so poor.

But his merit as an artist lies in the fact

that he is incapable of compromise,

and though I would like him to work for Vogue,

his pictures are not of Vogue quality,

for they are much more serious, too provoking and better than fashion.

But Cecil Beaton did introduce Blumenfeld to Vogue and, in 1939,

the magazine was to give him two big fashion spreads, Blumenfeld's first.

WOMAN SINGS IN FRENCH

Paris in the 1920s and 1930s obviously is a very exciting place.

No need to go into the theatre, the music, the jazz, the art.

I mean, it's a really thriving, incredible place to be.

For fashion, it's particularly extraordinary

and spectacular for many reasons.

Obviously, you know, the corsetry has disappeared,

women's bodies are now free.

There's quite a libertarian point of view

where women can express themselves quite differently.

What he was doing, really...

It's totally revolutionary,

the way he worked with the models like that,

in the way that the model looks through the camera, the way that

they connect with the photographer, and it's a unique way of working.

It actually sort of says more about him as a person, I think,

than just as a photographer. Up to that point, I think

most photographers treated models almost like mannequins.

You see in his images, they're free.

Working as Vogue's Paris features editor was a young writer

named Rosamond Bernier.

Vogue assigned me Blumenfeld.

I'd never met him.

They announced bravely, inaccurately,

"Blumenfeld is re-reading Proust with this job,"

and he roared with laughter.

He'd never opened a page of Proust.

So I met this very amiable man, and we got along like a house on fire.

He was such fun. He had a sense of humour.

He was totally unpretentious, totally flexible.

"Shall we do this?" "Why not? Off we go."

So, at six in the morning, Blumenfeld came to wake me up,

and there was no question of taking a suitcase and nightgown,

I was just in my underwear.

And so he laughed and took that picture.

Although he spent his days photographing women,

Blumenfeld was never afraid to celebrate the sexual ambiguity

in himself, as in this self-portrait.

It was an urge that spilled over into real life.

I think that he felt attracted to certain men like Cecil Beaton.

As he said very proudly, "I was always a virgin from the rear end."

His rear end was virginal but, other than that,

he had no particular feelings about, er...

having oral contact with various people.

There were rumours that he had some kind of relationship with Cary Grant

and, as far as I'm concerned, it was all possible.

I think through the first photos he did in Paris and in the late '30s,

you could really feel and incredible excitement

on his behalf already.

Finding himself finally in Paris,

finally commissioned to do this work,

I think was, for him, already really incredibly exciting,

and you can feel that in the pictures.

It's kind of like when the sun comes out and the rays come up

and you're almost blinded.

His pictures were daring.

There is a no more daring shot, perhaps, that exists

in the history of fashion photography than the girl on the Eiffel Tower.

What he did and why he's so important is this enormous

breadth of desire and technique and audacity and really...

I mean, it's hard to see it now in the way it must have been seen

at the time but the cutting-edge-ness of Erwin Blumenfeld's work,

at that time, must have been fairly incredible.

With money from his first spreads in Vogue,

Blumenfeld's wife, Lene, and their three children -

Lisette, Henry and Yorick -

were able to join Erwin in Paris from Holland.

Still desperately poor, the family was happily all together again.

It wasn't to last.

When the Second World War was declared in 1939,

Blumenfeld, a Jew in Paris with a German passport,

was all the wrong things in all the wrong places.

Fearing what might befall him,

on the 4th of September, when war had already broken out,

he put all of his photographs - including his glass plates -

into two huge suitcases and took them in the Dome cafe.

Here, completely by chance,

he met a young woman who was pushing a trolley.

He said to her, "Look, do you think you could take my pictures

"and keep them for me until, you know, things change?"

And after the war in 1947,

when he went back, he found them and she had kept them all intact.

Within months, all of Blumenfeld's worst nightmares came true.

His wife and sons were classified as Dutch

and therefore seen as Allied citizens.

But Blumenfeld and his daughter, Lisette, now 18,

despite being Jewish, were both classed as German

and sent to two different internment camps.

Blumenfeld was sent to Le Vernet.

In a bizarre twist, although he was interned by the French

for being German, these haunting photomontages that Blumenfeld

created of Adolf Hitler in the '30s were later dropped over Germany

by the Allied forces during the war as anti-German propaganda.

# The last time I saw Paris

# Her trees were dressed for spring

# And lovers walked beneath those trees

# And birds found songs to sing... #

Only after Vichy France surrendered to the Germans

was Erwin Blumenfeld released and the family finally reunited.

# ..their squeaky horns

# Was music to my ears... #

When I first saw my father, I was absolutely horrified

because his hair had been shaven off.

He looked like a semi-skeleton because the food had been terrible

and he hadn't been able to sleep very well there at all

and it was really a sort of nightmare experience for him.

We all found each other.

We all got together and, for a whole year, we waited.

My father managed to get visas to the United States

and after three months travelling from Marseille to Casablanca

we finally arrived in New York City.

Three days after arriving in Manhattan,

Blumenfeld bought a new suit

and went to see Carmel Snow, the editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar,

which was the leading fashion magazine of the day.

Without getting up, without looking up, "Blumenfeld! Talk of the devil!

"Two of Juan's pages are impossible

"and he's gone off on holiday again.

"We have to have the September issue finalised by tomorrow. Quick!

"Run up to the studio right away and do some fabulous retakes."

When Blumenfeld arrived, he would have found something

so different from what was in Europe.

It was an exciting time for magazines.

It was an exciting time for fashion because, for the first time, America

was all on its own in producing fashion without French references.

There was a sense of possibility.

Among those who Blumenfeld photographed

was Carmen Dell'Orefice,

who is best known today as the world's oldest working supermodel.

It was Blumenfeld who first shot her for Vogue

and put her on the cover in 1947. They remained friends until he died.

In his studio, he was such an artist.

I came in

and he made me feel like a guest.

Like an honoured guest, who was so perfect

and was doing something so wonderful for him.

It just made me feel that I was all right.

That I was smart.

I didn't know quite what it was that I did

but I could accept his opinion

because it was in the smallest gesture of approval

as I listened to what Erwin Blumenfeld directed me

either to stand or to sit or to move my hand or turn my head.

He contained me within the thoughts

of the picture he had in his head,

that he was creating a painting,

only with more dimension.

With lights, this huge camera

that he was behind with the black cloth over him.

Blumenfeld had a charisma that was undeniable, that was incredible.

I mean, women just loved him. They really did.

He was seductive without wanting to be.

He would come into a room,

he'd be the only person there that you would focus on.

Everything would stop.

And this had to do with some interior power that he had.

And a woman who might not be beautiful

would be beautiful in his presence if he saw her as beautiful.

In 1947, a woman walked into his studio who was to change his life.

Kathleen Levy Barnett was an extraordinarily glamorous

young photo editor and stylist.

And she ran Erwin Blumenfeld's studio at 222 Central Park South,

transforming his business by securing a lot of commercial work

and buying his first colour printer.

She was also to become the second great love of his life.

Certainly in the years from the time he was in America

to the time he died, certainly his greatest love was Kathleen.

Blumenfeld's seven-year affair with Kathleen

was helped by the tolerant attitude of his wife, Lena.

Well, as long as it was in the open and it wasn't a secret thing

and as long as it didn't seem too serious,

she thought this was a great artist, provocative.

I mean, Picasso had women going through revolving doors

and why didn't her husband, who was a great photographer

and a great artist, have the same privilege?

And she, I think, had relatively, relatively open ideas about...

..extramarital affairs, absolutely, but not...

She didn't want my father to leave her.

This is an entry from Lena's diary.

"When he tells me things that hurt me, he wants not only to hurt me

"but at the same time, he wants my understanding and the feeling that,

"because of our love for each other, I am part of him,

"not as a mother, but as his other half."

With Kathleen now a permanent fixture in the Blumenfeld family,

it was only a matter of time before a Blumenfeld's middle son,

Henry, a physicist, was to strike up a relationship with her.

They were later to marry.

It was Erwin Blumenfeld who had played matchmaker.

And he was also, at times, extremely jealous... But still...

..he brought us together initially.

And he also brought us together at a later date

when we had been separated for a while.

And yet, at the same time, he was very jealous at other times. So...

It is...complex.

After Kathleen married Henry, Erwin's understanding wife, Lena,

came to accept and settled into the role of grandmother

to Kathleen and Henry's two children.

-YORICK:

-Well, she was, I think, also very jealous of Kathleen

but as long as Kathleen wasn't going to marry him or run away with him,

I think that she was relieved not to lose my father.

But there was one person in the family

who would never accept Kathleen -

Erwin's very first photographic muse, his daughter, Lisette.

My mother told me about a picture of Kathleen standing in between

Henry, who she had married,

and Blumenfeld, whom she had loved.

And my mother thought it was disgusting that they both looked

the same, and then there was Kathleen in the middle.

This animosity between family members would come back to haunt

Blumenfeld from beyond the grave.

But, during his lifetime, the main tension was not

between Kathleen and Erwin's beloved daughter, Lisette.

From the time that he moved to New York, the real conflict

was between art and commerce, between the work he did for money

and the pictures he took in the pursuit of beauty.

All photographers have to earn a living, so he went

where the money was and we know that he felt a little badly about that.

At one point he suggested to Yorick, his son,

that he had prostituted himself.

And it's interesting that several times in his autobiography

he talks about prostitution. I think it's kind of interesting.

He seems to be suggesting that prostitution is not so much

just about him, but rather a kind of temptation

and a widespread part of the human condition.

I think we can go that far.

So Blumenfeld, the photographer, Blumenfeld the artist,

is a much more interesting subject

than Blumenfeld the fashion photographer.

In the 1960s, Blumenfeld the commercial artist

was to embark on an exciting new adventure

as the director of the world's first fashion films.

The latter part of his career, with certain of his clients,

he suggested to them that the fashion and beauty imagery could be seen

in movement just as beautifully as it could be seen as a still image.

And this fact is probably one of the most important facts

and one of the most relevant today.

He was talking about how he was taking his beautiful imagery

onto television, and that could be a revolution in how you communicated,

so these little films were really ahead of their time

and stand up very well artistically when we look at them now.

The beauty that he put in his still images is very coherent

and very dominant in his films.

His other risky late-life adventure was with a 22-year-old Swiss girl

named Marina Schinz, who worked with him as an assistant from 1961.

Her father was a famous radiologist in Switzerland

and he was so famous that the Fuhrer came to him to be examined

when he had some kind of cancerous problem,

and Herr Schinz was the Fuhrer's chosen doctor.

-And...

-Was that spoken of? I mean...?

-Yes.

And Blumenfeld, being a Jew from Berlin,

was obsessed with Hitler from the very beginning.

-YORICK:

-Eventually, they became lovers

and, when my mother was in Vienna,

in the hospital, sick,

I think only then did Marina come to stay with my father.

My mother did know all about what was going on.

When his wife, Lena, was with us in Vienna and she was in hospital

and she was really suffering, he came over to see her

and there was an immensely emotional scene in the hospital

where Erwin was crying and they were holding each other

and it was so tender and loving that I could hardly stay in the same room.

But even Lena's tolerance had its limits, as she wrote to him in 1967.

"Neither the beautiful memories of our past,

"nor the wonderful children and grandchildren we have together,

"have helped us to live together in harmony.

"Neither can I suffer any longer at this way.

"That's why I must finally agree that it might be better

"if you marry M.

"But you don't want me to be part of this any longer,

"as I was before.

"Because you don't want to be old with me.

"You want to be young, with M."

# The other woman

# Finds time to manicure her nails

# The other woman is perfect where her rival fails... #

In his last relationship with Marina, he wanted to explain it to us,

because we didn't really understand what his attraction was

or what the relationship was. I'll never forget -

we were sitting in a cafe in Paris and there was a mirror behind him.

And he said, "When I sit here, and someday you'll understand this,

"when I sit here, looking at my image as it gets older every minute

"I'm looking at it, it's horrifying.

"But if I can be with a young woman, and I look in her eyes,

"and I see an image of myself as a young man,

"I feel re-energised, rejuvenated and I feel I am escaping the inevitable."

And I think that that was incredibly honest of him.

He was very afraid of becoming old.

It wasn't only intimations of his own mortality

that threatened Blumenfeld.

The magazine world, too, was changing before his eyes.

I think, at one time, he was regarded

as one of the leading photographers in America.

And then a new generation came in

and he was already seen as the old generation.

Fashion runs in cycles, it always has.

It doesn't take long before things fall out of fashion -

that's one certainty in fashion.

If you don't like what you see, wait six months and it'll all change.

The magazine just changed. Culture changed.

What they were reporting on changed, the clothes changed

and the new photographers came in.

This was a new experience for Blumenfeld, who had been lionised

virtually from the day he entered the New York fashion world.

But the '60s revolution in taste and style had run ahead of him,

and suddenly he had nowhere to go.

The summer of 1969 found him in Rome,

in the company of Marina Schinz.

We were giving a Fourth of July party.

I got this telephone call from Marina that he had died.

I think it was clear from the phone call from Marina that Erwin

had decided to end his life rather than simply die,

that he had run down these Spanish Steps and run back up them

and, when he got to the room,

and he hadn't been taking his heart medicine,

I think it was quite clear from that phone call

that it had happened in that way.

He forced this heart attack on himself,

thinking that he had prostate problems, perhaps cancer.

But, in any case, he did not want to have an operation

or he didn't want to die suffering

and going through a prolonged death - he wanted death.

That the 72-year-old Erwin Blumenfeld would kill himself

was shocking enough to his family.

But what happened next resulted in decades of dispute.

The people he was most closely involved with,

whether it was his children,

his daughter, Lisette,

his wife,

Kathleen, Marina,

they all felt they had...

They all felt possessively about him.

They all wanted to claim a part of him.

And I think that led to...

..enormous animosity when he died.

After the burial, it was revealed that he had left

the management of his photographic estate to his mistress, Marina.

She was to prove a reluctant champion.

I guess if Marina would have pushed the prints...

But Marina had a life and wanted to move on.

And didn't want to be

really known as...

Maybe she didn't want her early life to be exposed that way.

-How do you mean?

-Well, being his girlfriend.

She was 22 and he was 65.

For a photographer's reputation to survive,

you have to have left a champion.

That's how you survive after death as a photographer.

For the first 20 years about Marina,

she tried to do a little bit,

perhaps not too much, but at least she put things in proper boxes

and so on. She divided up the pictures and gave...

one quarter to each child and kept one quarter for herself.

Too many people, including some of the women in his life,

felt that they had an entitlement to a section of that life

and the story of his career.

So it became a kind of tug of war between various personalities.

You can't bring a body of work together when the motivating forces

behind the factions are jealousy, hatred and destruction.

And...

And self-interested power and glory and control.

It's been left to the grandchildren to put the past behind.

They are co-operating, making thousands of prints

left by Blumenfeld available to a wider public.

These photographs, taken at his studio at 222 Central Park South,

and published around the world in the '40s and '50s,

are finally being exhibited for the very first time,

thanks in particular to his granddaughter, Nadia.

I put a lot of work into this

to get them to a better condition,

to be recognised, to be shown to the world and not wait

for the rest of the family to say yes or no to this.

And so I think that, in time, his name will come up

for the future as one of the great photographers of the 20th century.

Museums are also at last opening their doors to Blumenfeld,

with big shows at the Louvre in Paris, Somerset House in London

and at the Metropolitan Museum of Photography here in Tokyo.

And as new generations are learning about Blumenfeld's work,

the man who shot to fame photographing beautiful women

is starting to be remembered as the richly complex artist he always was.

And I think that we have to really perhaps begin to see

the fuller picture again

and deal with the complexity of this individual

and understand how ahead of his time, how avant-garde he was.

And how willing he was to examine himself as an artist

and be open to all of these mediums.

If you look at his work,

it's been copied by pretty much every photographer

that has worked in the kind of art-nudes...

sort of fashion-beauty world.

In one way or another,

we've all drawn inspiration,

whether you've known it or not.

I think it's important to see him

as a great photographer.

If we want to say he's a great fashion photographer, he was.

And he did things in fashion that set the trend for years to come.

What makes it so timeless is the fact that the beauty

is still as beautiful today as it was 70 years ago.

He was able to define beauty

and the women of the 20th century.

I've spent my whole life letting off suicidal steam

which some might call vitality.

To date, everyone has had to die.

Yet immortality is just around the corner.

It's every man for himself.

Will I manage to shuffle off this mortal coil?

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd