Italienisches Stilleben

Herbert List

Herbert List first pursued photography as a hobby, but his talent led him to become the preeminent photographer of the Fotografia Metafísica style and brought him considerable commercial success. As a student in Heidelberg, List apprenticed for a coffee dealer and began taking photographs while traveling on business. Increasingly enmeshed in the European avant-garde of the 1930s, he began to develop his own style of still life and portrait photography. His fascination with Surrealism and the Bauhaus influenced his aesthetic —as did later encounters with the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Italian Neorealist film —and his images have been compared to the paintings of Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico. List’s photos of Grecian architecture and landscapes earned him his first solo show in Paris in 1937, and commissions from Life and Harper’s Bazaar soon followed —as did an offer to contribute to the photo agency Magnum.