Art: The Baron in Egypt

What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died tinder Pharaoh’s lash or Egypt’s sun? It was well that they died that I might have the pyramids to look on, or to fill a musing hour with wonderment.

These frank sentiments of the late, annoyingly literary George Moore got some rich encouragement last week. The best-known photographer of Harper’s Bazaar had turned his glamorizing lenses on Gizeh and Thebes (see cuts). Baron George Hoyningen-Huene (pronounced Hoyningen-Hew-ney), 43, collaborated with Egyptologist George Steindorff, formerly of Leipzig University, in the publication of a super-glossy picture book with a short but solid text, Egypt (J. J. Augustin; $7.50). Fashion photographer Hoyningen-Huene went at his job with self-evident Schiaparelish; he romanticized immemorial stone as effectively as he ever did laces and velvets.

He had a photogenic subject to begin with: the ageless, sun-soaked ruins of the Nile Valley. Some of Photographer Hoyningen-Huene’s dramatically lighted pictures were made in Egypt, some among the monumental Egyptian sculptures now in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum. One of the book’s more striking pictures is a restatement of an old theme: Instead of snapping the Pyramid of Cheops, Huene photographs its huge triangular shadow partially blacking the gleaming modern town at its base.

Balloon Wanted. For 18 years the temperamental Baron has been a luxurious virtuoso among fashion photographers in the U.S. George Hoyningen-Huene was born in imperial St. Petersburg, the son of a Baltic nobleman and an American woman from Detroit. The Hoyningen-Huene family title dates from the 12th Century. During the Russian Revolution young Huene studied in England. After the Armistice he joined the British Army and served in South Russia.

As a White Russian refugee, Huene lived in the Paris of the ’20s. He was a movie extra, teashop waiter, once went to Poland as a railway-tie inspector for the Belgian Government. In Paris he finally took up his profession, working for Vogue. He speedily established himself as a master of deluxe and diaphanous effects. He moved to the U.S. in 1935, when he began photographing for Harper’s Bazaar.

In peacetime Huene was a great traveler —to Africa, Indo-China, Bali, Mexico. Until the Germans confiscated it, he had a house in Hammamet, near Tunis. Now he contents himself with a cottage at Glen Cove, Long Island, amiably decorated with batik, leopardskins and rattan furniture. He wants to do a lot more archeological photography, especially of half-obliterated ruins from the vantage point of a balloon.