When Irving Penn went to Paris in 1950 to shoot the couture collections for Vogue, the 33-year-old photographer fell in love. The woman he lost his heart to, and whom he’d marry just a few months later? Lisa Fonssagrives, a stunning, 39-year-old Swedish model who’s credited as being the world’s first-ever supermodel.
“Lisa was the Linda Evangelista of her day,” says Michael Gross, author of “Focus: The Sexy, Secret, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers” (Atria Books, out now). Though her contemporary Dorian Leigh garnered more headlines, as she dated bullfighters and aristocrats, Fonssagrives was, as Time magazine wrote in 1949, the “highest-paid, highest-praised high-fashion model in the business.”
Now, Fonssagrives is back in the public eye thanks to her fruitful collaboration with her husband, seen in the new exhibit, “Irving Penn: Centennial,” opening April 24 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among the show’s hundreds of Penn photos, the dozens he shot of Fonssagrives, who quickly became his muse, have a particular electricity and verve.
The photos “defined formal elegance and style for their era, but they also transcend their time,” says Penn’s publisher Nick Callaway. “They are great works of art.”
Fonssagrives, who had an aristocratic bearing, was born Lisa Birgitta Bernstone in Sweden in 1911. Trained in dance and sculpture, she studied ballet in Paris where she met her first husband, photographer Fernand Fonssagrives. When a neighbor asked her to model hats for him, Fernand showed the resulting photos to Vogue, which asked her to sit for test shots with renowned photographer Horst P. Horst.
“I arrived terrified,” Fonssagrives told Bomb Magazine in the 1980s. “I had never seen a fashion magazine; I didn’t know what fashion was.” But the editors loved what they saw, and offered her work.
Notorious for her dedication, Fonssagrives once did a photo shoot hanging from the side of the Eiffel Tower for Erwin Blumenfeld, and parachuted from an airplane for Jean Moral.
And she was far more than a model. “She was [also] interested in photography, form and light,” says Gross. “She was a dream to work with.”
After divorcing her first husband, Fonssagrives moved to a farm on Long Island with her daughter, Mia, in 1949. That year, the Swedish beauty became the first fashion plate to land on the cover of Time, and in 1950 she had her fateful photo shoot with Penn.
Undoubtedly, some of her most iconic images were shot by Penn. More interested in portraits and still lifes than fashion shoots, Penn found in Fonssagrives someone equally obsessed with the formal aspects of photography. With her expert posing and command of photographic techniques, she was transformed into a statuesque mermaid in a Rochas gown, and a Picasso harlequin in a black-and-white checkered Balenciaga robe.
“Much like Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, or Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, I think they had a great influence on each other as artists as well as husband and wife,” Callaway says.
Fonssagrives continued to model well into her 40s. She also took up photography, shooting for Ladies’ Home Journal and other publications, and she, like Penn, worked on avant-garde techniques to manipulate images. She later designed clothes for Penn’s ad campaigns, and created a clothing line for Lord & Taylor in the mid-’50s.
“She wasn’t just a clothes-hanger,” says Gross, using a term that Fonssagrives herself coined. “She had a brain, taste and knowledge.”
In the late 1950s and ’60s, Fonssagrives left the fashion world, spending more time in Huntington, where she worked on her sculptures, which were exhibited at Marlborough Gallery in NYC.
“She created these mostly bronze, sensuous, organic forms,” says Callaway. “But she was very modest about it. She let [Penn] have the limelight.”
Fonssagrives, who died in 1992 at the age of 80 (Penn died in 2009) “was gorgeous, and incredibly classy . . . And there was clearly a strong bond between [her and Penn],” says Priscilla Rattazzi, who photographed Fonssagrives later in her life. But most importantly, she adds, “she was a real artist.”