An Eye for Beauty

The exhibit was organized by the Rome Municipality Cultural Department in collaboration with the Herbert List Foundation of Hamburg, Contrasto and Magnum Photos. It pays homage to the master’s art with a first-ever collection of his most famous masterpieces along with an unpublished collection of images shot in Rome and throughout Italy between the 1930s and the 1950s.
Herbert List’s camera traveled across Europe and produced unique metaphysical images. He met and photographed the intellectuals of his time, but above all he documented a view of the Mediterranean world that is powerful and fascinating.
List’s “ metaphysical photography” encounters views of Rome’s piazzas and streets; portraits of great Italian intellectuals are intermingled with faces met in passing - images of a generation just coming out of World War II. It is an elegant, erotic and romantic vision of the Mediterranean world combined, in this exhibit, with photographs of the newly opened Termini Station.
Herbert List was born in Hamburg in 1903 and died in Munich in 1975. He was a great photographer - an attentive and curious traveler, a discriminating art collector and a visionary poet, who was able to produce images both perfect in form and intensely beautiful.
His photography is balanced, powerful and flawless. Since the 1950s, his images of southern Europe, of an unknown Italy, of Greece in all its glory have enchanted generations of photographers and artists.
A play of shadow, a reflection on the sea, a ray of sunlight in a Roman alleyway: with each picture List defines fragments of reality - perfect combinations of light and form - each unique, precious and rare. The equilibrium of his images reveals a fragile depth, and it is perhaps the fragility of beauty and art that Herbert List’s eye sought throughout his life in his travels. It is an eye that captures beauty’s fleeting moments, revealing it beneath what appears on the surface.