Death of photographer Frank Horvat, great portrait painter of women

Photographer Frank Horvat, a frequent traveler, fashion and street observer, author of striking portraits of women, has died at the age of 92, we learned from the Lelong gallery in Paris on Wednesday.

He had been the subject in this gallery until the beginning of October of an exhibition, presenting a series of sensual and colorful portraits of women in the tradition of classical painting. He had chosen to reconstruct famous paintings by posing contemporary female models.

Of Italian origin, born in 1928 in Abbazia (now Opatija in Croatia) to parents who were doctors, Jews and from Central Europe, Frank Horvat lived in Boulogne-Billancourt, in the Paris region.

He had met Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1950. An important meeting which was to encourage him to undertake a two-year trip to Asia, as an independent photojournalist.

In the 1960s, he had gained international fame for his fashion photos, considered to renew the genre, with a more realistic and less staid style.

Frank Horvat lived in Switzerland, Italy, Pakistan, India, England and France, where he had settled in the late 1950s.

Torn between the grasp of immediacy and nostalgia, he is also the author of three color photographic essays intended for exhibitions and books.

In 2000, the Maillol museum in Paris devoted a double exhibition to him with “vintages” (period prints) from “Paris 1950”, but also “1999, a photographic journal”, chronicle of things seen for 360 days, which he had defined as “a sort of composite picture of (his) visual horizon”.

“I did not take pictures of war, misery, suffering or madness: not out of indifference to these misfortunes, but because I feel neither the moral justification, nor the physical courage to face such situations as a photographer ”, he explained then.

As for celebrities, “they are not part of my world,” he added.