Can fashion photography be dangerous? Lillian Bassman was told as much when, in 1950, she started making photographs so abstract that you could barely see the clothes. Depicting midcentury style for the pages of magazines, she distilled gowns and girdles to their essential silhouettes; in her photographs, chance gestures and elegant lines convey the sensations of garments, as their details dissolve into atmospheric blur. What Bassman did not show she evoked in her expressive prints—products of darkroom distortion, achieved with tissues, brushes, and bleach.

In an earlier era, such an approach might have precluded commercial success. Bassman’s timing, though, could not have been better; in 1941, at age 24, she took a design job at Harper’s Bazaar, where a group of artists and editors were then reimagining how the magazine should look. With them, she helped introduce an avant-garde sensibility to the American newsstand, advancing new possibilities for photography in print.

In works from a remarkable gift to The Met, Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond highlights the influence and audacity of her magazine career. The exhibition flips between the New School in Manhattan and the “New Look” in Paris, charting Bassman’s course from design apprentice to art director and accomplished photographer. Its rare vintage prints, collages, and maquettes lay out an unlikely history of modernism, refashioned for the pages of the popular press.