Hellas

We cite from the Coper:
Herbert List (1903-1975), born into a prosperous Hamburg merchant family with artistic leanings and connections to the European avant-garde of the period, began taking amateur photographs around 1930. When he left Germany in 1936 for political and personal reasons, he made his hobby into his profession. Today, his calm, detached photographs are considered rare examples of a cosmopolitan, highly cultured and at the same time surrealist type of photography. As early as the end of the 19305, List had compiled a portfolio of photographs for a large book of illustrations on Greece, commissioned by the Paris publisher Charles Peignot, editor of the renowned Editions Arts er Me'tiers Graphiques. The outbreak of war prevented the project from being realized. In association with the Estate of Herbert List, we have now produced from the abundance of Lists photographs of Greece a reconstruction of the book, essentially following the photographer’s original intentions. The photographs, dating from between 1937 and 1939 - landscapes, fragments of sculpture, ruined temples, figures of people at the sea - conjure up a vision of classical Hellas bathed in light and beauty, from which the traces of the twentieth century are largely excluded. In view of the tempestuous assaults made by "civilizing" development and the devastations associated With it that the Greek landscape has suffered during the last six decades, Herbert List’s photographs themselves are now almost like archaeological discoveries that have come down to us from a distant, long-vanished Golden Age.
The book, edited by Max Scheler and Iason Demos, contains as an introductory essay a text by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), in which the Austrian poet and dramatist describes his impressions of his first journey to Greece in 1922.