(3 Sep 2014) Declared the 'photographer of style', Horst was the man Hollywood sirens and fashion icons wanted to be snapped by.
Now, a retrospective of his work gives us all a peep at the pioneer of the colour photograph.
On display are some of the German-born artist's best known images, including stylised fashion photos, drawings and prints from his sixty year career.
There's nothing B-list about this pantheon of celebrities.
Horst P Horst was a favourite in Hollywood and with some like Marlene Dietrich, a professional relationship became a long friendship.
He was born in 1906 and christened Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann in Germany. He studied design with the founders of the Bauhaus School which would contribute to his future art work, and portraiture.
In 1930s Paris he became apprenticed to Le Corbusier the famous architect learning about structure and space.
Then a meeting with the star photographer Baron George Hoyningen-Huene dramatically shifted his life.
Horst learned his trade from a master of photography, enjoying the creativity in the world of Paris that surrounded him.
Brought to the attention of Vogue, Hollywood stars like Bette Davis and French designer Coco Chanel become part of his circle.
Here at London's Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) hundreds of Horst's work is on show.
Exhibition curator Susanna Brown says: "Horst began photographing stage and screen stars in 1932. His first star portrait was of Gertrude Lawrence - it's a picture very much inspired by the art deco simplicity of the work of his colleague at Vogue Edward Steichen."
This simplicity also attracted artists like Salvador Dali.
Horst was also beginning to use his other early influences, such as classical sculpture and art.
His black and white nudes look almost sculptural.
Brown says: "To my mind he's someone who, although many of his images have become icons of 20th Century photography, the name 'Horst' isn't perhaps as well-known as it should be."
It's Horst's colour photographs for Vogue in America that are well known.
They are bright and bold and still carry a air of modernity.
Vogue's publishers Conde Nast have contributed volumes of treasured old magazines, but also its archived transparencies which have been used to create new prints.
Senior director Shawn Waldron helped to curate the collection.
He says: "Horst did a lot of colour work early on in the '40s and '50s, he was a pioneer in colour. But the thing about colour work is that there is no vintage print, so he would have shot it on transparencies, they made separations, they printed it in the magazine, and then the transparency was filed away in the archive and really hasn't been seen since."
It's interesting to hear that these beautiful colour photographs weren't necessarily aimed at the reader, or following demands of the photographer.
According to Waldron, it was about the advertisers:
"They spent a lot of money and years on researching and developing a way to produce colour. To show colour fashion in the magazine, but also as a way to entice advertisers at the time, during the Great Depression in America, where everyone was looking for an up. So that happened in the 1930s. And then in 1936 you get the development of colour film, comes out from Kodak and Agfa. So he was photographing colour as early as the mid-1930s."
Another interesting development in magazine artistry also appeared on Horst's watch.
This is the famous "Mainbocher Corset".
Statuesque it appears to conform with the classical ideal of beauty, but the loosened bodice hints at an eroticism which American Vogue considered to be too much for the reader.
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