William Klein

Michael Hoppen Gallery, London

Private Collection, United Kingdom

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Vogue [Paris], October 1958, p. 146, illustrated

Paris, Centre Pompidou, William Klein, 1983, p. 83, illustrated

William Klein, In and Out of Focus, New York 1994, cover, illustrated

Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva, In Vogue: The Illustrated History of the World's Most Famous Magazine, New York 2012, n.p., illustrated

This is the first in a series of 19 photographs from the collection of Henri van der Tol offered for sale through the auction (lots 148 – 165).

Dramatic, seductive and glamorous, Smoke + Veil epitomizes both the beauty and dynamism that distinguishes William Klein’s visual practice. Its importance within Klein’s work was cemented by its selection as the cover image of his seminal monograph from 1994 In and Out of Fashion. Originally taken for Vogue magazine in 1958, this iconic photograph remains captivating more than half a century since its making.

Born in New York, Klein spent two years in the US army stationed in Germany where he won his first camera in a poker game. Following the end of his service in 1948, he moved to Paris, enrolled at the Sorbonne and trained as a painter under Fernand Léger. In 1954, Klein met Alexander Lieberman, the then art director of American Vogue, who soon started publishing Klein’s photographs in the magazine. 

Klein’s collaboration with Vogue began in a period in which an increasingly number of women entered professional life and found pre-war standards of beauty outdated. Rejecting the polished elegance previously promoted by fashion magazines, Klein injected the dynamism of graphic arts and New Wave cinema into his work. His pioneering close-ups broke the rules of fashion photography, and his unmistakable grainy and high-contrast images came to embody the cultural shift of post-war Europe. With Klein, Vogue was no longer selling romantic visions of femininity to its audience. Instead, it was championing modern lifestyles of confident individuals.

Klein’s capacity to evoke the era’s palpable energy of social transformation is exemplified in Smoke + Veil. Utilising his raw technique to capture the act of smoking, Klein expresses in one image a woman’s dynamic attitude that is as empowering today as when it was first seen.

Prints of this image are in various institutional collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Minneapolis Institute of Art.