A View From The Temple: The Photographs Of Herbert List

A View from the Temple: The Photographs of Herbert List

Max Scheler

In the late 1920s and early '30s Hamburg was second only to Berlin as an artistic center in Germany; a leading figure in the city's art scene was the son of a Hamburg coffee merchant, Herbert List. In 1929 Stephen Spender came to Hamburg to see the new liberal Germany; in his novel The Temple, Spender describes meeting List and the circle of young people around him. In that period List was becoming increasingly interested in photography. His first impetus to take photographs was simply to take pictures of his friends; later he began to use his friends as models for things he had in his mind—he put them in masks, posed them in costumes, set up tableaux at the beach. He also began to photograph surrealistic still lifes at this time.

List didn’t like the coffee business, and didn’t like Hamburg—for political reasons, but also for personal reasons: he was homosexual, which was difficult in those days. Finally in 1935 he moved to Paris to photograph. List’s pictures were published in a few magazines, among them Arts et Metiers Graphiques and Photographie; he tried fashion photography, but it apparently didn’t interest him much, as only a few examples survive.

In 1936 List visited Greece and was so impressed that he moved there the following year. For the next few years he divided his time between Paris and Greece. When Germany invaded Greece in 1941 he returned to Germany and settled in Munich. List made few photographs during the war. He had difficulties because he was of Jewish blood—he was only a quarter Jewish, but that was enough to taint you.

In 1944 he was drafted and stationed in Norway, where he worked in a map studio. At the end of the war he settled again in Munich and began to photograph for various magazines, including Heute, Epoca, and others. He made many books, among them a collection of his pictures from Greece, Licht über Hellas (Light over Hellas), and a book on Naples that he made with the filmmaker Vittorio DeSica. In the late 1950s List made many portraits of artists and writers throughout Europe. At that time he was considered the top magazine photographer in Germany. Occasionally his old photographs would be published here and there, in quality magazines.

More and more, though, he became involved in collecting drawings, mainly Italian master drawings. Finally in the early ’60s he gave up photography altogether and devoted most of his time and energy to his drawing collection, which by the end of his life had become quite significant.

List was never really a professional photographer, but was in the best sense an amateur. He was well educated in literature and the arts, but he always had doubts about whether photography was an art. For him photography was a reflection of himself, and of the way he lived his life. □