Exhibition: ‘The Paris of Brassaï. Photographs of the City Picasso Loved’ at the Museo Picasso Málaga

Exhibition dates: 19th October, 2021 – 3rd April, 2022

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984) 'Steps of Montmartre with a white dog, Paris' 1932 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'The Paris of Brassaï. Photographs of the City Picasso Loved' at the Museo Picasso Málaga, Oct, 2021 - April, 2022

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Steps of Montmartre with a white dog, Paris
1932
Gelatin silver print
30 x 40cm
Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

A quick text today as I’m still not well with bronchitis.

I really struggled to get images for this posting, the museum supplying 12 of the 21 photographs while I gathered the rest after seeing an installation image from the exhibition and deciphering further images from the preview to the catalogue of the exhibition on the Amazon website.

If you are interested in the subject matter – photographs of an environment where Picasso was in his element, a volcano at the epicentre of a vibrant, creative city – then I think the catalogue would be the way to go… but at close to $100 for just 152 pages the cost might seem a little excessive.

My favourite images in the posting are the two atmospheric photographs of Picasso’s sculptures in his studios.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museo Picasso Málaga for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984) 'A chair in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris' 1947 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'The Paris of Brassaï. Photographs of the City Picasso Loved' at the Museo Picasso Málaga, Oct, 2021 - April, 2022

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
A chair in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris
1947
Gelatin silver print
23 x 17.5cm
Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984) 'Luxembourg Gardens basin, Paris' 1930 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'The Paris of Brassaï. Photographs of the City Picasso Loved' at the Museo Picasso Málaga, Oct, 2021 - April, 2022

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Luxembourg Gardens basin, Paris
1930
Gelatin silver print
29.6 x 22.3cm
Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984) 'Au Cochon Limousin' 1935

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
‘Au cochon limousin’, rue Lecourbe, Paris
1935
Gelatin silver print, modern copy
29.8 x 22.9cm
Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Fat Claude and her girlfriend at Le Monocle, Paris
c. 1932
Gelatin silver print
27.6 x 22.1cm
Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Kiki with her accordion player at the Cabaret des Fleurs, Rue de Montparnasse
c. 1932
Gelatin silver print
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Trapeze artists, Medano Circus
1932
Gelatin silver print
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Colonne Morris dans le Brouillard
1933
Gelatin silver print
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Self-portrait, Boulevard Saint-Jacques, Paris
1930-1932
Gelatin silver print
29.6 x 22.9cm
Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

The exhibition The Paris of Brassaï. Photographs of the City Picasso Loved, presented by Museo Picasso Málaga, shows the work of one of the most famous European photographers of the first half of the 20th century. With his work, Brassaï helped to create the universal public image of Paris, the Eternal City. It is displayed here alongside works by Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Lucien Clergue, Fernand Léger, Dora Maar and Henri Michaux, and with period piece films, posters, sheet music and a large quantity of documentary material.

Brassaï’s photographs invite the viewer to wander through Paris, with its river Seine, Notre Dame, its brothels and its markets. His conjured up a superb depiction of society in his many shots of the intellectual, literary, and artistic scene of 1930s and 1940s Paris, ranging from Sartre to Beckett.

This exhibition has been organised with sponsorship from Fundación Unicaja and the special collaboration of Estate Brassaï succession, Paris; Institut Français, Seville, and Musée national Picasso-Paris. It sheds light on the professional relationship and friendship between Brassaï and Picasso, who considered Brassaï to be the best photographer of his work.

Brassaï arrived in Paris from Hungary in 1924. Little by little, he discovered the dynamic nature and the social idiosyncrasies of the great metropolis. While he initially explored the city’s nightlife, over time he began to create a precise X-ray of its architecture and its people. He joined the fascinating intellectual and artistic avant-garde community of which Picasso was a member, becoming one of its finest eyewitness photographers. But Brassaï was not just a photographer, he was also a versatile artist who drew, made sculptures, decorated, and made films.

As a photographer, Brassaï constructed a visual topography of the city of light (and shadows) in the 1930s and 40s, but this exhibition also aims to show him as a prolific creative artist. The Paris of Brassaï. Photographs of the City Picasso Loved features over 300 works, with photographs, drawings and sculptures that come mainly from the Brassaï family archives (Estate Brassaï Succession). Also on display are photographs and artworks by Pablo Picasso, alongside works by Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Lucien Clergue, Fernand Léger, Dora Maar and Henri Michaux.

Films, posters, musical scores, theatre programmes and a large quantity of documentary material from the Paris of that period, make up an exhibition that takes the visitor back to an unforgettable city and time.

The structure of the exhibition comprises four sections that relate to film, the visual arts, literature, and music, based on the photographic work of one of the most famous photographers of the first half of the 20th century. The exhibition layout begins with Who is Brassaï? which displays artistic works whose main feature is their expressive freedom. Paris by Day features scenes from everyday life as if they were being shown for the first time: Paris by Night is a journey through a city of shadows that evokes the melancholy that emanated from the streets and characters. Conversations with Picasso brings together work by the two artists who enjoyed a long-lasting professional and personal relationship.

The Eye of Paris

Brassaï was the pseudonym of Gyula Halász (1899-1984), a Hungarian photographer who was best known for his work on Paris, the city where he made his career. When he was three years old, his family moved to the French capital, in the year that his father, a professor of literature, was teaching at the Sorbonne. As a young man, Brassaï studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, before joining the Cavalry of the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. In 1920, he went to live in Berlin to work as a journalist and to study at the University of the Arts. In 1924, he moved back to Paris, where he remained for the rest of his life. He soon made friends with writers Henry Miller (who described him in one of his books as “the eye of Paris”), León-Paul Fargue and Jacques Prévert. Inspired by his frequent night-time walks around Paris, Gyula Halász asked to borrow a camera to capture the beauty of the streets and gardens in the rain and fog. He used poetic metaphors in these pictures, leading more than one graphic reporter to describe him as a poet with a camera. He then began to sign his work with the pseudonym Brassaï. It means “the man from Brasso”, his birthplace, which is now part of Romania.

In the 1930s, Paris was by no means a feast. Various events were leaving their mark on a new age, with major financial and political repercussions. The decade began with one of the greatest financial crises the world had ever experienced: the Great Depression. This was to lead to the collapse of the financial system and to poverty for thousands of families. Europe was facing the possibility of new wars and uprisings that would lead to the rise of totalitarianism. Culture and art were not blind to these events, but art dealers and artists were irresistibly drawn to Paris, seeking in the City of Light a new artistic and personal life that matched their ideals, along with the necessary freedom to make them happen.

Brassaï’s photographic work during these years helped to construct the image we have today of the French capital, with its depictions of artistic, social and intellectual life. He took X-ray-like shots of the great city, during the day and at night, from its dark alleyways to it dazzling social and artistic scene. The exhibition The Paris of Brassaï. Photographs of the City Picasso Loved shows the modern, cosmopolitan city par excellence, in a Europe that bore the hallmarks of the great changes brought about by 19th-century industry and by the international exhibitions of the early 20th-century. It was a city that Brassaï loved, as did his colleague and friend, Pablo Picasso.

Night Walks

In 1932 he published his first photographic book, “Paris de Nuit”. It contained high-contrast night shots with full bleed and no margins that feature the play of light and shadow, taken on streets, squares, rooftops, street corners, gardens, buildings and monuments. During his nocturnal wanderings, smoking cigarette after cigarette, the gaslights, fog and car headlights lit up a unique Paris, transforming its rigorously classical architecture and capturing the strange beauty of the fleeting shadows. His negatives became black and white photographs with a strong sense of mystery. They are pictures that alter your perception of the familiar. “Paris de Nuit” was a cultural sensation and a well-deserved success that caught the attention of leading art magazines such as Minotaure, one of the most important cultural publications of the time.

Brassaï liked to say that his birthplace was very close to that of Count Dracula, and that, like him, he was a nocturnal creature. For this reason, in several of his unforgettable photobooks he showed an alternative Paris, with scenes in brothels and bars where young gay men, lesbians and transvestites are all seen having fun. They also contain scenes from the city’s social life, high society, and intellectual circles.

Portraying the Intellectual Circles

The photographer himself described 1932 and 1933 as the most important years of his life. It was during these years that he met the key figures of Parisian cultural life, many of whom were also foreigners, and he evolved alongside the intellectual milieu and the artistic avant-garde movements that were flourishing in Paris at the time.

His earliest works coincided with the rise of Surrealism in France. The movement believed that photography encouraged a division of the poetic personality simultaneously into subject and object. But although his pictures display the same attraction to the dreamworld expressed by the surrealists, and his series on graffiti indicates his interest in the wonder of random discovery and the primitive world, Brassaï always denied belonging to the movement. His photographs, based on the traditional realist style, are evocative images that condense the atmosphere of a brief moment, without becoming documentary photography.

Brassaï was part of the Paris intellectual circle, as was Picasso, at a time when art was flourishing. He took photographs of artists who were to become the sacred monsters of our age, many of whom were his friends: Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, as well as leading writers of the time such as Jean Genet and Henri Michaux. His portraits reveal his great skill at capturing the personality of his sitters, creating a collective portrait of the intellectual circle.

On the Walls of Paris

Brassaï was the first person in the history of modern photography to intuitively consider the camera as a tool with which to dissect urban life. “The eye of Paris”, as Henry Miller dubbed him in one of his essays, also directed his gaze at the drawings, marks and doodles on Paris walls. He came across these popular anonymous signs and imprints on walls during his walks along Parisian alleyways: faces, symbols, animals, handprints, the scratched-on outlines of sketches… They were captivatingly primitive, and he elevated them to the status of “Art Maudit” or Damned Art because, for him, they were more than just ways for people to express themselves.

Over the years, Brassaï compiled a catalogue of the marks that the capital’s inhabitants left on its walls, with photos that no editor would publish, until at last they were collected together in a book, Graffiti (1961), after Edward Steichen declared his admiration for this work and his intention of organising an exhibition at MoMA in New York. When Brassaï immortalised these street pictures, the term graffiti had not yet been coined, and it was not until the 1980s that it finally became classified as Urban or Street Art.

Brassaï was a prolific creative artist who also produced drawings and sculptures, wrote numerous articles and published 17 books. His film Tant qu’il y aura des bêtes won the award for the best original short film at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956, and in 1978 he won France’s Grand Prix National de la Photographie.

Brassaï / Picasso. A Friendship

Photography constantly accompanied Picasso, not only as a testimony to his life, but often revealing his personality, work and inner circle. Of all the many relationships he struck up in Paris with writers, essayists, playwrights and visual artists, the Museo Picasso Málaga exhibition focuses on the close and prolific professional relationship between Brassaï and Pablo Picasso.

In December. 1932, the art critic Tériade invited Brassaï to take pictures of Picasso, his studio and his sculptures, to illustrate the first issue of Minotaure. This collaboration led to a long and sincere friendship that was sustained by mutual admiration. Brassaï was fascinated by Picasso’s personality, and Picasso admired the photographer’s unbiased gaze. The two friends were both foreigners in the big city: one of them was to become one of the great photographers of the 20th century, and the other, the great artist who changed the history of art. They shared an extraordinary gift for observation, as well as great curiosity. They both collected strange objects that had been thrown away and found again by chance, and they shared a keen interest in primitive art, art brut, bones, poetry and graffiti. They also had a common dislike of focussing on a single discipline, in their urge to explore other creative fields.

This obvious and very special complicity meant that Brassaï became an exceptional witness to Picasso’s private world: the places where he created art, the works themselves, his family life and his friends. Brassaï was one of the few people Picasso allowed free access to his studios, and he was the first to photograph his sculptures. The Málaga-born artist opened the doors of his studios to him in Boisgeloup, La Boétie and Grands Augustins, successively. Brassaï had a great sense of detail, he knew how to put order into disorder, and he composed his photographs in an almost architectural way, giving a new dimension to the works Picasso created and the objects and materials with which he surrounded himself.

One of the most important books in terms of getting to know Picasso, is Brassaï’s Conversations with Picasso (1964), a fascinating text that is outstanding for the immediacy and detail of a man who wrote in the same way he took pictures. This chronicle, which Brassaï illustrated with over 50 photographs, runs from September 1943 – eleven years after he first met Picasso – to September 1962. It provides us with two decades-worth of the artist’s story and, above all, of an environment where Picasso was the epicentre, while at the same time describing the history of art and the main events of those years. The relationship between Brassaï and Picasso remained intact until the Spaniard’s death in 1973. Brassaï died in the South of France in 1984 and was buried in Montparnasse cemetery, in the city that both he and Picasso loved.

For the occasion, Museo Picasso Málaga and La Fábrica have jointly published the photobook Brassaï (Paris & Picasso), which contains 105 full-page photographs and an excerpt from the text in which Henry Miller dubbed Brassaï “The eye of Paris”. This bi-lingual hardback edition is printed on coated paper, to highlight the photographs’ half-tones and nuances of light and shade. The book is now available to purchase from the Museo Picasso Málaga bookshop and is due to be distributed to Spanish, European and US bookshops.

Press release from the Museo Picasso Málaga

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
The fireplace in Pablo Picasso’s studio, Rue La Boétie
1932
Gelatin silver print
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Pablo Picasso in the studio on Rue la Boétie, in front of the portrait of Yadwigha by Henri Rousseau, Paris
1932
Gelatin silver print
28.1 x 21.8cm
Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

“When I enter the studio, I leave my body at the door… I only allow my spirit to go in there and paint”

Pablo Picasso

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Plaster sculptures in Pablo Picasso’s studio, Boisgeloup
December 1932
Gelatin silver print
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

In 1930, Picasso acquires a house and land near Gisors, Normandy, with the aim of creating monumental sculptures. Of those he creates there, La femme au vase (Woman with Vase), a piece from 1933, stands out for its great symbolic weight, given that it is placed on the artist’s tomb in the Château of Vauvenargues. But it is above all the busts of Marie-Thérèse Walter, his young secret lover, who both Brassaï and Boris Kochno capture with their respective lenses in attempts to recreate the peculiar atmosphere of that country studio, inhabited by strange creatures. While Kochno’s report is that of an amateur, Brassaï’s is a commission for the first issue of Minotaure art magazine, from 1933, accompanying a text by André Breton, “Picasso dans son élément” (Picasso in his Element), which reveals Picasso as a sculptor, a facet of his work that was completely unknown until then.

Anonymous text from the Museo Picasso website Nd [Online] Cited 11/03/2022

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Weekend, Paris
1936
Gelatin silver print
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Man with Ram (1943), Bust of Dora Maar (1941) and Seated Cat (1941-1943) by Pablo Picasso, Paris
1943
Gelatin silver print
30 x 20.7cm
Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Málaga, 2021

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Pablo Picasso at the window of his studio on the Rue des Grands Augustins, Paris
1939
Gelatin silver print
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)
Ile de la Cité – vue de Notre-Dame de Paris
Paris, 26 February 1945
Oil on canvas
80 x 120cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
© Rheinisches Bildarchiv Cologne
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Málaga, 2021

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Detail of the plaster sculpture Woman with Leaves (Pablo Picasso, 1934) in the studio on the rue des Grands Augustins, Paris
1943
Gelatin silver print
27.7 x 22.1cm
Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Málaga, 2021

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)
Woman with Leaves, Boisgeloup
1934
Original plaster varnished
38.5 x 27.5 x 21cm
Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte, Madrid
On temporary loan to the Museo Picasso Málaga
© Sucesión Pablo Picasso, VEGAP, Málaga, 2021

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Circumstantial Magic. Sprouting Potato
1931
Gelatin silver print
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
The Sun King, Paris
1930-1950
From the Graffiti series
Gelatin silver print
40 x 29.5cm
Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Le Poussin
1955
From the Graffiti series
Gelatin silver print
© Estate Brassaï Succession-Philippe Ribeyrolles

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Exhibition: ‘Eugène Atget, Voir Paris’ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

Exhibition dates: 3rd June – 19th September, 2021

Curators: Anne de Mondenard, Head of the Photography and Digital Images Department, musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris Agnès Sire, Artistic director, Fondation HCB

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Parc Delessert, XVIe' 1914 from the exhibition 'Eugène Atget, Voir Paris' at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, June - Sept, 2021

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Parc Delessert, XVIe
1914
Albumen print
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

The power of imagination

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Albert Einstein

Imagination, or Visualisation, may be simply defined as the formation of mental images or pictures. It helps us form images of the world – in the case of Atget, images of Old Paris – in which the viewer can value the experience of walking in the city, Paris, walking in the footsteps of history through the gaze of the artist, our gaze.

If we exercise our imagination we can resist, and subvert, our presumed reality – undermining the so-called reality of the world, a world in which we are rationally and relationally forced to understand how things are and how they work.

This is what artists do… they undermine the logic of the world through being exposed to the qualities instantiated in the physical world, and by then stepping aside from that world they exercise their imagination to create, to imagine, to expose themselves (much like a photographic plate) to the perceptions of an external physical world viewed from multiple perspectives.

Thus, “Imagination … plays a central role in empirical cognition by serving as the basis for both memory and the creative arts. In addition it also plays a kind of mediating role between the faculties of sensibility and understanding. Kant calls this mediating role a “transcendental function” of the imagination. It mediates and transcends by being tied in its functioning to both faculties. On one hand, it produces sensible representations, and is thus connected to sensibility. On the other hand, it is not a purely passive faculty but rather engages in the activity of bringing together various representations, as does memory, for example. Kant explicitly connects understanding with this kind of active mental processing.”1

How appropriate for the visualisations of Atget, purported documents for artists but in an alternative reality, poetic concepts (of his imagination) in which he “invites us to exercise our gaze, to consider the complexity of the world as the source of our faculty of imagination.”

You only have to look at one image to imagine Atget lugging his large plate camera to the Place du Tertre, Montmartre in 1922 (below); scouting the square in the 18th arrondissement of Paris near the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur; setting up the camera on its heavy tripod, throwing the dark cloth over his head and then focusing the composition on the ground glass – to then place a tree dissected by another tree directly in your eye line, and starting half way up the tree.2 Who would do that!

It gives you the shivers… the scene is just a little too real. It appears from the transcendental function of the imagination as surrealist “other”. It is un/real. Super real.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Colin McLear. “Kant: Philosophy of Mind,” on the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy website [Online] Cited 20/06/2021.

2/ Also note how far the camera front has moved beyond the circle of light from the lens – so vertical parallels stay parallel.

Many thankx to the Fondation HCB for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Eugène Atget gave up a career as an actor in order to pursue a relatively new art: photographic recording. From the most classical architecture to the most remote courtyards, Atget, more interested in the city, obsessively depicted a Paris marked by history, offering his prints to painters and libraries. Characters that show up in the frame blend into the background.

Atget said little to nothing about his own work. Reported statements served to define his project as essentially documentary, but it was his direct, poetic approach that fascinated many of his contemporaries. This produced contradictory commentary on his unusual oeuvre. He was fundamentally independent, a bit austere, and fostered neither intellectual concepts nor artistic principles as foundations from which to value experience. He invites us to exercise our gaze, to consider the complexity of the world as the source of our faculty of imagination.

Interview des commissaires de l’exposition Eugène Atget – Voir Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Église Saint-Médard, Ve' 1900-1901 from the exhibition 'Eugène Atget, Voir Paris' at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, June - Sept, 2021

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Église Saint-Médard, Ve (Church of Saint-Médard, Ve)
1900-1901
Albumen print
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Ambassade d'Autriche, 57, rue de Varenne, VIIe' 1905

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Ambassade d’Autriche, 57, rue de Varenne, VIIe (Austrian embassy, 57, rue de Varenne, VIIe)
1905
Albumen print
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Un coin de l'entrepôt de Bercy, rue Léopold, XIIe' 1913

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Un coin de l’entrepôt de Bercy, rue Léopold, XIIe (A corner of the Bercy warehouse, rue Léopold, XIIe)
1913
Albumen print
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Maison de Balzac, 24, rue Berton, XVIe
1913
Albumen print
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Place du Tertre, Montmartre, XVIIIe
1922
Albumen print
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Fortifications, porte de Sèvres, XVe
1923
Albumen print
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

This exhibition, presented at the Fondation HCB, is the fruit of long research efforts jointly undertaken by the two institutions throughout the musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris’ collections. The result is an outstanding presentation of the oeuvre of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), a unique figure and photography pioneer. Above all an artisan, Atget’s prolific output of photographs was intended for artists and lovers of the old Paris; he rose to fame posthumously. A forerunner of modernity is seen in his work by art critics and photographers, among them Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose early work sought to imitate Atget. Paris’ place within the oeuvre of Cartier-Bresson is also the subject of an exhibition at the musée Carnavalet from June 15 to October 31, a project in partnership with the Fondation HCB.

First acknowledged in the United States and by the French surrealist scene before finding acclaim with succeeding generations of photographers, Atget still exerts unprecedented influence in the 21st century, though reception of his work remains mixed. Bearing a view camera and glass plates, he often captured his subject at dawn. For almost thirty years, he sought to make a collection of the Paris of his time. He also explored city limits, what is known as “the zone”. Today, his images of nearly‑deserted streets, store fronts, and courtyards evidence urban change at the turn of the 20th century.

Beyond its documentary aspects, Atget’s photography expresses a deep aesthetic sensibility, illustrating the incalculable contribution he made to the medium. As Paris changed, Atget’s work method evolved accordingly, becoming more and more sensitive to the light and to atmospheric effects. This devotion to detail (using a modest subject matter), in contrast to the triumphant pictorialism of the time, is also singularly modern, allowing a notion of pleasure to surface – one which is rarely mentioned in reference to Atget. The exhibition and its accompanying publication propose sharing this pleasure.

The exhibition is organised by the musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, Paris-Musées and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. The musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris houses a collection of over 9,000 prints by Atget, the largest archive on the photographer. The exhibition Eugène Atget – Voir Paris presents a selection of around 150 of the artist’s original prints.

Biography

Eugène Atget was born in Libourne, France in 1857. He gave up a career as an actor and took up photography starting in 1888. He was self-taught. In 1890, he began producing material for use by artists: shots of plants, landscapes and diverse objects. In 1897, he started to take photographs of the Paris of his time systematically, attentive to scenes of urban life, architectural detail and the capital’s topography. Towards the end of his life, he met Man Ray’s assistant, Berenice Abbott, who took two portraits of him. He died in Paris in 1927. Abbott learned of his death just as she was planning to offer him the portraits. Along with gallerist Julien Levy and Atget’s executor, André Calmettes, Abbott aided in rescuing Atget’s studio archive, the recognition of his work through various publications, and the admission of the Abbott / Levy collection to the New York Museum of Modern Art’s collection in 1968.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Cabaret de l’Homme armé, 25, rue des Blancs-Manteaux, IVe
September 1900
Albumen print
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Ancien hôtel Sully-Charost, 11, rue du Cherche-Midi, VIe' 1904

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Ancien hôtel Sully-Charost, 11, rue du Cherche-Midi, VIe (Former Sully-Charost hotel, 11, rue du Cherche-Midi, VIe)
1904
Albumen print
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Vieille maison, 6, rue de Fourcy, IVe' 1910

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Vieille maison, 6, rue de Fourcy, IVe (Old house, 6, rue de Fourcy, IVe)
1910
Albumen print
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Fontaine du passage des Singes, 6, rue des Guillemites, IVe
1911
Albumen print
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Coin de la place Saint-André-des-Arts et de la rue Hautefeuille, VIe' 1912

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Coin de la place Saint-André-des-Arts et de la rue Hautefeuille, VIe (Corner of Place Saint-André-des-Arts and Rue Hautefeuille, VIe)
1912
Albumen print
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 'Un coin du pont Marie, IVe' 1921

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Un coin du pont Marie, IVe (A corner of Marie bridge, IVe)
1921
Albumen print
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Rue des Chantres, IVe
1923
Albumen print
© Paris Musées / musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
79 rue des Archives
75003 Paris

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday
11am – 7pm
Closed on Mondays

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

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Photographs: ‘Early French aviator glass slides’ c. 1913-1914

August 2020

Unknown photographer. 'Untitled [Early French aviators]' c. 1913-1914 (detail)

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviators] (detail)
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Those daring young men in their war machines

I have always been fascinated with flight, and aeroplanes. When I was seventeen, I tried to enrol in the RAF as a fighter pilot, hence my own interest in the subject artistically over the last 10 years.

These fabulous and rare French large format glass slides were for sale on Ebay many moons ago, illustrated as negative images only. They fetched an enormous sum of money, far beyond the humble means I had at my disposal to purchase them. But I kept the negative jpg images, inverted them into positives, and I have cleaned them up as best I can. Not the best outcome, not the best quality, but better than nothing … and it means that other people can get to see them.

Taken in 1913, or possibly in 1914 the first year of the Great War – there are no guns present on the bomber, but this is not unusual for the early part of the war as can be seen in the photograph of Captain Maurice Happe in his bomber of 1915 below – I have spent a long time researching the make of the bomber and, with the help of the knowledgeable Jacques Crouille (thank you!), ascertaining the period uniforms that the men are wearing. The photographs seem to have been shot in one sitting, for the images contain the same wooden sheds, picket fence, and two bomber aircraft (one with wire wheels, one with solid wheels) of the “pusher” type, possibly a Farman MF.11 Shorthorn bomber. This means that the propellor is at the back of the aircraft pushing the plane along, instead of being placed in the front.

What I find fascinating are the attitudes of the men toward the camera, and the wonderful details present in the images. With their nonchalantly relaxed pose, arm on wing, clad in thick, buttoned flight suits trimmed at leg and neck with real fur to keep them warm up in the beyond, these daring young men stare straight at the camera. Their early leather helmets or “bone domes”, used in motor-racing and adopted by pilots as head protection, rest on the wing beside them. Some wear thick bezelled, large crowned aviation (a term coined in 1863) watches, which in the Great War were to be used to make coordinated attacks possible at a precise moment. As the men pose in front of their aircraft, what is also notable is the fragility of the machine: lashings of wood and canvas, wire wheels, and a huge amount of wire bracing, so much so it seems that the pilots are caught in a spiders web of the stuff as they stand there staring down the camera.

It must be winter, for snow and mud is on the ground, caking their short boots, knee length boots, and the wheels of the bombers. With slicked down hair, sometimes parted in the middle, sometimes paired with a moustache, the men’s waists are cinched with thick belts, their hands sheathed in leather gloves. Or. Clutching their gloves in bare hands. One handsome young man – possibly a mechanic wearing the dark blue uniform of the Chasseurs Alpins, his large beret carrying the yellow (daffodil) hunting horn insignia – is encased in the wonderfully titled “bandes molletières” (or puttees in English terminology), attire more regularly seen on infantry troops, and wears a ring on the fifth finger of his right hand. What is most amusing is the small doll attached to the front of bomber in the first photograph in the posting, like a carved figurehead on the bow of a ship (see above). A good luck charm?

These men would have needed it. Because of their slow speed (106km/h), bombers were particularly susceptible to German fighters (over 160km/h) and ground fire. No parachutes were issued to the crews of Allied “heavier-than-air” aircraft in World War 1, since it was thought that if a pilot had a parachute he would jump from the plane when hit rather than trying to save the aircraft (Wikipedia). The average life expectancy of a British Royal Flying Corp (RFC) pilot was just 18 airborne hours.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

These photographs are used under “fair use” conditions for the purpose of research and education. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Unknown photographer. 'Untitled [Early French aviators]' c. 1913-1914

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviators]
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Unknown photographer
Captain Maurice Happe, rear seat, commander of French squadron MF 29, seated in his Farman MF.11 Shorthorn bomber with a Captain Berthaut. The plane bears the insignia of the first unit, a Croix de Guerre
c. 1915
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress

Italian Army Photographers 1915-1918
World War 1 – Italian Army: Second Battle of the Isonzo – Farman MF.11 Shorthorn light bomber of the Italian air force
between 18 July – 3 August 1915
Gelatin silver print
Italian Army Historic Photogallery
CC By 2.5

Farman MF.11 Shorthorn bomber

The Maurice Farman MF.11 Shorthorn is a French aircraft developed before World War I by the Farman Aviation Works. It was used as a reconnaissance and light bomber during the early part of World War I, later being relegated to training duties. …

A pusher configuration unequal-span biplane like the earlier Farman MF.7, the MF.11 differed in lacking the forward-mounted elevator, the replacement of the biplane horizontal tail surfaces with a single surface with a pair of rudders mounted above it, and the mounting of the nacelle containing crew and engine in the gap between the two wings. The aircraft was also fitted with a machine gun for the observer, whose position was changed from the rear seat to the front in order to give a clear field of fire. …

The MF.11 served in both the British and French air services on the Western Front in the early stages of the war. As a light bomber it flew the first bombing raid of the war when on 21 December 1914 an MF.11 of the Royal Naval Air Service attacked German artillery positions around Ostend, Belgium.

The MF.11 was withdrawn from front-line service on the Western Front in 1915, but continued to be used by the French in Macedonia and the Middle East, while the British also used it in the Dardanelles, and Africa. The Australian Flying Corps (AFC), provided with the MF.11 by the British Indian Army, operated it during the Mesopotamian campaign of 1915-16.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Farman MF 11, photo reconnaissance

Unknown photographer. 'Untitled [Early French aviator]' c. 1913-1914

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator]
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator] (details)
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator] (detail)
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator] (details)
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator]
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

The winged badge worn on the vaseure, probably blue, indicates that this man is WW1 French aviation. French pilots wore kepi. This is not the case here. This man wore a beret with a badge, a horn, from the “Chasseurs Alpins”. At least in the beginning, a member of French aviation wore equipment from their first assignment. Here, probably Chasseurs Alpins. He’s not a pilot nor an officer, maybe a mechanic? Chasseurs Alpins were, and still are, elite mountain troops based in The Alps.

Jacques Crouille

Chasseur

Chasseur, a French term for “hunter”, is the designation given to certain regiments of French and Belgian light infantry (chasseurs à pied) or light cavalry (chasseurs à cheval) to denote troops trained for rapid action.

Chasseurs Alpins

The Chasseurs Alpins (English: Alpine Hunters) are the elite mountain infantry of the French Army. They are trained to operate in mountainous terrain and in urban warfare. …

France created its own mountain corps in the late 19th century in order to oppose any Italian invasion through the Alps. In 1859-70 Italy became unified, forming a powerful state. The French army saw this geopolitical change as a potential threat to their Alpine border, especially as the Italian army was already creating troops specialised in mountain warfare (the Alpini). On December 24, 1888, the first troupes de montagne (“mountain troops”) corps were created from 12 of the 31 existing Chasseurs à pied (“Hunters on Foot'”/”Foot Rifles'”) battalions.

Initially these units were named bataillons alpins de chasseurs à pied (“Alpine Battalions of Hunters on Foot”/”Alpine Foot Rifle Battalions”). Later this was shortened to bataillons de chasseurs alpins (“Battalions of Alpine Hunters”). From their establishment the chasseurs Alpins wore a plain and practical uniform designed to be suitable for mountain service. This comprised a loose-fitting dark blue jacket and blue-grey breeches, together with a large beret carrying the yellow (daffodil) hunting horn insignia of the Chasseur branch. They are believed to have been the first regular military unit to have worn this form of headdress.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator] (details)
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Bandes molletières

The bottom photograph shows his “bandes molletières” (literally “bandages”, in English leggings or more usually puttees).

Bandes molletières is a ribbon of cloth that encloses the calves from the ankle to the knee, and which was worn by the military. It protects the leg and replaces high boots, avoiding the entry of dirt or mud when crawling, without aggravating the shortage of leather, the main raw material necessary for the manufacture of boots.

They are fast to set up (30 seconds for cross-mounting with a little training) and, when properly adjusted, their compression effect allows men to withstand long periods of standing. Nevertheless, they become sodden with water in wet ground and when it rains.

Puttees

Puttee, also spelled puttie, is the name, adapted from the Hindi paṭṭī, bandage (Skt. paṭṭa, strip of cloth), for a covering for the lower part of the leg from the ankle to the knee, alternatively known as: legwraps, leg bindings, winingas, or wickelbander. They consist of a long narrow piece of cloth wound tightly, and spirally round the leg, and serving to provide both support and protection. They were worn by both mounted and dismounted soldiers, generally taking the place of the leather or cloth gaiter.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator] (details)
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator]
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

The winged badge worn on the vaseure, probably sand colour, says that this man is WW1 French aviation. He may be an observer / gunner as he is wearing a kepi, but not a good one. He has no wings on the collar, so he’s not an officer. The gloves and the watch may indicate he is member of the flight crew. Observer? Gunner? It’s hard to be precise as the French air force was at its beginning and uniforms came from different army corps. Aviation at that time was part of the Land Force.

Jacques Crouille

Kepi

The kepi is a cap with a flat circular top and a peak, or visor. Etymologically, the term is a loanword of the French képi, itself a re-spelled version of the Alemannic Käppi: a diminutive form of Kappe, meaning “cap”. In Europe, this headgear is most commonly associated with French military and police uniforms, though versions of it were widely worn by other armies during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator] (details)
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Kepi, French Air Service, Kiffin Rockwell, Lafayette Escadrille

This kepi is an example of the type worn by Foreign Legion in the French Army during the First World War. This kepi was worn by Kiffin Rockwell in the French Air Service. It was not unusual for individuals that transferred to the air service to continue to use the uniform of their original service branch.

Kiffin Rockwell flew with the Lafayette Escadrille during World War I. Kiffin and his brother Paul went to France in August 1914 and joined the French Foreign Legion. Kiffin entered combat in the winter of 1915 and was severely wounded at Neuville-Saint-Vaast later that May. Following a lengthy convalescence, Kiffin obtained a transfer to the French Air Service and was one of the original members of the Escadrille Lafayette, a squadron of American pilots flying for France. Rockwell shot down his first of four German aircraft on May 18, 1916, in Alsace. On September 23, 1916, he was shot down over Verdun and buried at Luxiul. For his services to France, Rockwell was awarded the Medaille Miliataire and the Croix de Guerre with two palms.

Text and image from the National Air and Space Museum website [Online] Cited 12/03/2019. No longer available online

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator] (details)
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator]
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Unknown photographer. 'Untitled [Early French aviator]' c. 1913-14

Unknown photographer (French?)
Untitled [Early French aviator]
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator] (detail)
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

German pilot helmet of World War I
Dated to 1910s
Hat size 57
Made of Leather, wool, cotton/linen and metal
Height: 150 mm (5.9 in); Width: 210 mm (8.2 in); Depth: 225 mm (8.8 in)
Hamburg Museum
CC3.0

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator]
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator] (details)
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator]
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator] (details)
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator]
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

Unknown photographer (French)
Untitled [Early French aviator] (details)
c. 1913-1914
Positive from glass plate negative

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Text: “Atget’s shadow,” on his Paris photographs

August 2020

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Fontaine des Quatre-Parties-du-Monde, Jardin Marco Polo, Paris
1907
Albumen silver print

Atget’s shadow

A delicious posting on the work of the French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927). Atget’s photographs bridge the gap between subjective and objective representation – on the one hand extolling the subjective quality of art as an expression of the artist’s inner self; but on the other, providing a rejection of artistic consciousness, his objective “documents for artists” appealing to the Surrealists who used his images in publications such as Révolution Surréaliste.

In their presence, the photographs of Atget proffer an intimate in/tension (intention) – between representation and abstraction, documentary and modern, ordinary and dream. His photography, “which focussed on seemingly ordinary sights on the streets of Paris – a door knocker, a mannequin, a window rail – is seen as a forerunner of Surrealist and modern approaches to photography.”1

Further, “The critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin famously invoked crime scenes in discussing Atget’s photographs. He was pointing to their emptiness, their clinical attention to details of the urban landscape, their absolute rejection of the sentimental and the grandiose. … In Atget’s Paris, “the city is evacuated, like an apartment that hasn’t yet found its new tenant,” Benjamin wrote.”2

And yet, there is always something of the artist in every photograph, no matter how criminal the raping of time.

Thinking of my latest body of work “A Day in the Tiergarten”, my current research into parks and photographers, and then looking at Atget’s photographs of parks, I believe that the “park” with Atget takes some of its meaning from the ownership of the parks and the royalty / citizen system that was in place at the time AND what that might allow. Here is the photographer bearing his heavy camera like a tramp on the road, wandering in an empty domain owned by a higher power – and using its magnificence to discover more about the self searching vagabond.

Sometimes the question: “is there anyone here” is answered like Cocteau in Beauty and the Beast, and the answer is: “yes there is – yourself” says the (objective) camera. Sometimes, in other ways, the photographer goes nearly crazy with the possibilities of photography: what is the truth about my presence, the presence of a rock, or the sky? Yes, there is you, but in saying that it opens up all these other (subjective) possibilities. The options of inserting ourselves into representation, into what photography can hold, drives us crazy.

As Lee Friedlander observes, “The photographs of these places … are a hint, just a blink at a piece of the real world. At most, an aphrodisiac.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ “Surrealism did not always involve the strange and absurd. For example, the photography of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), which focussed on seemingly ordinary sights on the streets of Paris – a door knocker, a mannequin, a window rail – is seen as a forerunner of Surrealist and modern approaches to photography… Only a year before his death, in 1926, Atget was approached by Man Ray for approval to use his photograph, L’Eclipse – Avril 1912 for the front cover of the publication La Révolution Surréaliste. Despite protestations that, “these are simply documents I make”, Atget’s rejection of artistic self-consciousness combined with his pictures of an old, often hauntingly deserted Paris, appealed to Surrealists.”

Anonymous. “Surrealist photography,” on the V&A website [Online] Cited 07/08/2020

2/ Anonymous. “Atget’s Paris, 100 years later,” on the Art Daily website 31/05/2020

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“The subject itself,” he wrote of landscape, “is simply perfect, and no matter how well you manage as a photographer, you will only ever give a hint as to how good the real thing is. We photographers don’t really make anything: we peck at the world and try to find something curious or wild or beautiful that might fit into what the medium of photography can hold.”

“The photographs of these places,” he added, “are a hint, just a blink at a piece of the real world. At most, an aphrodisiac.”

Lee Friedlander

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Ancien Hotel dit de Sartine – 21 rue du Cherche-Midi, Paris
1906
Albumen silver print

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Ancien Monastère des Bénédictins Anglais, 269 rue Saint-Jacques. Paris 5
1900
Albumen silver print

Eugène Atget. 'Hôtel du Maréchal de Tallard, 78 rue des Archives' c. 1898-1905

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Hôtel du Maréchal de Tallard, 78 rue des Archives
c. 1898-1905
Albumen silver print

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Grille de l’ancien pavillon de chasse de Philippe-Égalité (Hospice Debrousse), 148 rue de Bagnolet. Paris 20
1900
Albumen silver print

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Heurtoir, 19bis Rue Tournefort
1906
Albumen silver print

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Heurtoir, St. Étienne du Mont (Cherub Door Knocker)
1909
Albumen silver print

Eugène Atget (France 1857-1927) 'Heurtoir, 6 rue du Parc Royal' c. 1901-1914

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Heurtoir, 6 rue du Parc Royal
c. 1901-1914
Albumen silver print

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
L’Oranger (with Shadow of Photographer and His Camera)
1900
Albumen silver print

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Le Portail de l’église Saint-Éliphe, Rampillon (Seine-et-Marne)
1921
Albumen silver print

The critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin famously invoked crime scenes in discussing Atget’s photographs. He was pointing to their emptiness, their clinical attention to details of the urban landscape, their absolute rejection of the sentimental and the grandiose.

As Benjamin observed, Atget established a beneficial “distance between man and his environment.” And Lima’s haunting updated recreations confirm the long-dead photographer’s disquieting insight – Paris doesn’t care about your presence. It is indifferent, and will certainly go on without you.

You can feel joy at standing on a Paris street, but the feeling is not reciprocated.

Atget, who was born in 1857, initially tried unsuccessfully at acting and painting. In 1890, he set up shop as a photographer, in order – as a sign over his door said – to provide “Documents for Artists.” He knew that painters needed images as models for their work, and he set about furnishing them.

For nearly three decades, he trudged through the city, bearing his heavy tripod and documenting a Paris of narrow streets and grime-covered low buildings that was already disappearing.

In 1920, Atget wrote: “I can say that I possess all of Old Paris.”

The world was mostly indifferent to Atget’s work until, several years before his death in 1927, he met a young American photographer, Berenice Abbott, who was working as an assistant to the artist Man Ray. She photographed him, wrote about him, acquired many of his prints and promoted him relentlessly for 50 years.

Today, Atget is recognised as a major figure in the history of photography.

The empty Paris of his prints looms out of the half-light of what seems like perpetual fog. His buildings are independent of people. They don’t even need them. Paris, the message seems to be, continues. It does not care about the individual presence. The city is not sentimental about humankind.

True, traces of humanity are ever-present in his pictures – torn advertising posters, artisanal shop signs, bins of vegetables, rows of boots. But these are only reminders that the city might once have been inhabited. And there are few people in the images to confirm this.

In Atget’s Paris, “the city is evacuated, like an apartment that hasn’t yet found its new tenant,” Benjamin wrote.

Compare that with the images from today. The occasional masked figures are incidental to the landscape. That they wear masks, hiding part of their faces, is a further denial of their humanity.

The “picturesque” – which Atget shunned, as Benjamin points out – is more difficult to avoid…”

Anonymous. “Atget’s Paris, 100 years later,” on the Art Daily website 31/05/2020

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Notre Dame (Stalles), Paris
1905
Albumen silver print

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Notre Dame, Paris
1906
Albumen silver print

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Quai d’Anjou, Paris
1910
Albumen silver print

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Saint-Cloud
1926
Albumen silver print

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Rue des Lombards, Paris
1910
Albumen silver print

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Tuileries Gardens
1907
Albumen silver print

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Vigne (Grape Vine)
1920
Albumen silver print

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European photographic research tour exhibition: ‘Brassaï’ at Foam, Amsterdam

Exhibition dates: 13th September – 4th December 2019
Visited September 2019 posted July 2020

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

These are my thoughts at the time of my seeing the exhibition.

I have been blessed this trip by seeing an amazing selection of master photographers… Brassaï being no exception.

Every print in this exhibition is a vintage print. They were made by Brassaï before 1968. If larger than 30 x 40cm they were made after 1945 when he started printing with an enlarger.

As usual, the iPhone camera makes all the images too light and adds too much contrast. Think darker, less contrast in these vintage prints.

Brassaï’s prints are – just like those of Josef Sudek and August Sander that I have seen on this trip – much softer and with a more limited tonal range than I imagined. They are all the more atmospheric and magical because of it.

To walk around the exhibition and then arrive at an alcove (see walk through below)… to stand in front of Le Môme Bijou, the old lady with the jewellery and Billiard Player, is such a privilege. I am surrounded by the presence of these famous images. I peer intently at each of them, observing the details, feeling their eyes stare back at me. No deflection of intent, just these human beings and their spirit presented in a photograph. Brassaï captured their essence before they drifted away, just in that moment.

In the latter print the dark billiard ball was almost indistinguishable from the baize; in the former, the circular light in the woman’s eyes means that Brassaï must have set up a light, or that there was a light source, above and behind the camera. Specular highlights twinkle off jewellery and pearls. Even as she is draped in her bourgeois, bohemian ornamentation this dame of the night possesses a resilient, composed, determined air.

Personally, I think Brassaï’s Graffiti series are far stronger than Lee Friedlander’s series of the same name.

The juxtaposition of the photographs in Paris at Night is something I will always remember.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All iPhone installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan

The more scrupulously [the photographer] has respected the independence and autonomy of his subject, and the closer he has gone toward it instead of bringing it nearer to himself, the more completely his own personality has become incorporated into his pictures.

Brassaï

Foam is proud to present the first retrospective of Brassaï in the Netherlands. The French photographer of Hungarian descent is considered a key figure of 20th-century photography.

Brassaï (1899-1984) created countless iconic images of 1930s Parisian life. He was famous for capturing the grittier aspects of the city, but also documented high society, including the ballet, opera, and intellectuals – among them his friends and contemporaries like Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Henri Matisse. The exhibition at Foam traces his career with over 170 vintage prints, plus a selection of drawings, a sculpture and documentary material.

Brassaï gathers many of the artistic facets of the photographer, from photos to drawings of female nudes. It is organised in twelve thematic sections: Paris by Day, and by Night, Minotaure, Graffiti, Society, Places and Things, Personages, Sleep, Pleasures, Body of a Woman, Portraits – Artists, Writers, Friends and The Street. Each is very different from the next – reflecting the diversity of Brassaï’s photographic work.

Digital walk through of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam in September 2019

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing at second right, Brassaï's 'Paris' 1937, and at right 'Paris' c. 1932

Installation views of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing at second right in the bottom image, Brassaï’s Paris 1937, and at right Paris c. 1932
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Paris' c. 1932 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Paris (installation view)
c. 1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Paris' 1937 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Paris (installation view)
1937
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Wall text from the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam

Installation views of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Foam is proud to announce the first retrospective of Brassaï in the Netherlands. This French photographer of Hungarian descent is considered as one of the key figures of 20th-century photography. Brassaï (1899-1984) created countless iconic images of 1930s Parisian life. He was famous for capturing the grittier aspects of the city, but also documented high society, including the ballet, opera, and intellectuals – among them his friends and contemporaries like Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Henri Matisse. The exhibition at Foam traces his career with over 170 vintage prints, plus a selection of drawings, a sculpture and documentary material.

Gyula Halász, Brassaï’s original name, was born in 1899 in Brassó, Transylvania (then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, nowadays Brasov, Romania). He studied at the University of Arts in Berlin before finally settling in Paris in 1924, a city that was to become the main subject of his work. He started as a painter but soon discovered that his strongest and most original talent lay in photography. To keep his real name for his paintings, he signed journalistic work, caricatures and photographs with ‘Brassaï’ (from Brassó). His photos would make this pseudonym more famous than his real name. Brassaï’s work of the 1930s would become a cornerstone of a new tradition as photography was discovered as a medium with aesthetic potential. A generation earlier photographers had merely emulated the established arts. Now photography became an art in itself and the perfect medium to capture modern life.

The nocturnal scenes collected in his book Paris by Night (1933) are complemented by his work that reveals the everyday life of the city by day. The monuments, picturesque spots, scenes from daily life and architectural details are present in his work as a reflection of the irresistible fascination the artist felt for the French capital. In his quest to cover all of the facets of Paris, he also immersed himself in the city’s darker side. For Brassaï the gang members, outcasts, prostitutes and drug addicts all represented the least cosmopolitan aspect of Paris, an aspect that was more alive and more authentic. He compiled a huge collection of images of entertainment venues, ranging from night clubs to popular festivals and featuring the people who frequented them. Brassaï was deeply immersed in a wide circle of friends among the writers and artists of Montparnasse, who also became the subjects for some of his portraits. Most of the portraits taken by Brassaï were of well-known people, putting him into a very comfortable position. He collaborated with the luxury art magazine Minotaure right from its very first issue and enjoyed a prominent role for the publication over the years. After the war, he also travelled regularly on commissioned shoots for the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar.

The exhibition at Foam gathers many of the artistic facets of the photographer, from photos to drawings of female nudes. It is organised in twelve thematic sections: Paris by Day, and by Night, Minotaure, Graffiti, Society, Places and Things, Personages, Sleep, Pleasures, Body of a Woman, Portraits – Artists, Writers, Friends and The Street. Each is very different from the next – reflecting the diversity of Brassaï’s photographic work.

Press release from the Foam gallery website

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Staircase, Montmartre' 1937 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Staircase, Montmartre (installation view)
1937
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Les Escaliers de Montmartre, Paris' 1936 from the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam, Sept - Dec, 2019

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Les Escaliers de Montmartre, Paris
1936
Gelatin silver print

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'La rue Quincampoix' c. 1932 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
La rue Quincampoix (installation view)
c. 1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Pillar of the Elevated, Metro Glacière' 1932 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Pillar of the Elevated, Metro Glacière (installation view)
1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Near the rue Mouffetard' c. 1945 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Near the rue Mouffetard (installation view)
c. 1945
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing at centre, Brassaï's 'Concierge's Lodge, Paris' 1933

Installation views of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the lower image at centre, Brassaï’s Concierge’s Lodge, Paris, 1933
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Concierge's Lodge, Paris' 1933 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Concierge’s Lodge, Paris (installation view)
1933
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Concierge's Lodge, Paris' 1933 from the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam, Sept - Dec, 2019

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Concierge’s Lodge, Paris
1933
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Lovers at the gare Saint Lazare' c. 1937 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Lovers at the gare Saint Lazare (installation view)
c. 1937
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Sunday Painter, avenue du Général Leclerc' 1946 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Sunday Painter, avenue du Général Leclerc (installation view)
1946
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Annecy' 1936 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Annecy (installation view)
1936
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Hôtel de la Belle Étoile' 1945 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Hôtel de la Belle Étoile (installation view)
1945
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'A Corpse on the Banks on the Seine' 1931 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
A Corpse on the Banks on the Seine (installation view)
1931
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Les Fétes de Paris: La Nuit Féerique de Longhamp
1937
In L’illustration, no. 4, 923 (July 10, 1937)
13. Rue Saint-Georges, Paris (9°)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Regards, no. 155 (December 31, 1936)
Back cover
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing at at left, Brassaï’s Meat Porters, Les Halles c. 1935 and at second left, Au Cochon Limousin 1935
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Meat Porters, Les Halles' c. 1935 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Meat Porters, Les Halles (installation view)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Au Cochon Limousin' 1935 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Au Cochon Limousin (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Les Halles' 1930-32 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Les Halles (installation view)
1930-1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Cesspool cleaners' c. 1931 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Cesspool cleaners (installation view)
c. 1931
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Paris de nuit / Paris at night

Brassaï had been making photographs for barely two years when luck and ambition brought him a contract for a book on nocturnal Paris. When Paris de nuit (Paris at Night) was published to acclaim in December 1932, “Brassaï” became a familiar name in the world of photography. The book’s rich photogravures, marginalises pages, and bold design made it an icon of modernity. Many of Brassaï’s best night picture were made after Paris de nuit appeared, however, and many of his greatest images of Parisian nightlife were not published until 1976.

In the self-portrait here we see Brassaï’s first camera, a Voigtländer Bergheil that used 6.5 x 9 cm glass plates one at a time. The long exposures of night photography – often five minutes or more – required a tripod, which Brassaï frequently used for other pictures as well. While much of the adventurous European photography of the 1920s and 1930s celebrated mobility and speed, spontaneity was alien to Brassaï’s sensibility. He favoured images that are sharp, deliberate, and stable.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing a modern enlargement of Brassaï's 'Morris Column, avenue de l'Observatoire' 1934

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing at left a modern enlargement of Brassaï's 'Morris Column, avenue de l'Observatoire' 1934

Installation views of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing a modern enlargement of Brassaï’s Morris Column, avenue de l’Observatoire 1934
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Morris Column, avenue de l'Observatoire' 1934 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Morris Column, avenue de l’Observatoire (installation view)
1934
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Morris Column, avenue de l’Observatoire
1934
Gelatin silver print

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing at right, Brassaï’s Self portrait, On the boulevard Saint-Jacques 1930-1932
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász, 1899 - 1984) 'Self-portrait, Boulevard Saint-Jacques, Paris 14ème' c. 1931-1932

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Self portrait, On the boulevard Saint-Jacques
1930-1932
Gelatin silver print

Voigtländer
Bergheil
Built in 1932
6.5 x 9cm negative
Green

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing at left, Brassaï's 'The Tour Saint-Jacques' 1932-1933, and at third right 'View through the pont Royal toward the pont Solférino' c. 1933

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the bottom image at left, Brassaï’s The Tour Saint-Jacques 1932-1933, and at third right View through the pont Royal toward the pont Solférino c. 1933
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'The Tour Saint-Jacques' 1932-33 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
The Tour Saint-Jacques (installation view)
1932-1933
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
View through the pont Royal toward the pont Solférino
c. 1933
Gelatin silver print

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing at right, Brassaï’s Avenue de l’Observatoire in the Fog c. 1937
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Avenue de l'Observatoire in the Fog' c. 1937 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Avenue de l’Observatoire in the Fog (installation view)
c. 1937
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Avenue de l’Observatoire in the Fog
c. 1937
Gelatin silver print

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Paris de Nuit' (Paris at Night) 1932

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Paris de Nuit (Paris at Night) pp. 9-10
1932
Book

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Paris de Nuit (Paris at Night) pp. 13-14
1932
Book

Digital flick through of Brassaï’s Paris de Nuit (Paris at Night) book 1932
Video: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Paris de Nuit' (Paris at Night) 1932 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Paris de Nuit (Paris at Night) pp. 19-20 (installation view)
1932
Book
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Minotaure, no. 7 (June 1935)
Pages 24-25: Photographs by Brassaï, “Nuits parisiennes” (Parisian Nights)
Pages 26-29: Photographs by Brassaï
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Portraits – artists, writers and friends

In Brassaï’s era, portraits and nudes were bread-and-butter genres for any professional photographer. As a portraitist Brassaï made a speciality of artists and writers, who often were his friends, and in 1982 he collected many of the best pictures in Les artistes de ma vie (The Artists of My Life), for which he also wrote the lively text. He excelled at two distinct types of portraiture: In one, the artist is framed by his environment – the studio. In the other, the subjects confronts the photographer frankly, and the setting hardly matters. In an undated note, Brassaï summed up his approach to the second type: “To oblige the model to behave as if the photographer isn’t there really is to stage a comic performance. What’s natural is precisely not to dodge the photographer’s presence. The natural thing in that situation is for the model to pose honestly.”

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing at right, 'Oskar Kokoschka in his Studio, Paris' 1931-1932

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam at third right, Brassaï's 'Kiki de Montparnasse and her Friends, Thérèse Treize and Lily' c. 1932

Installation views of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the top photograph at right, Oskar Kokoschka in his Studio, Paris 1931-1932 (below) and in the bottom photograph at third right, Brassaï’s Kiki de Montparnasse and her Friends, Thérèse Treize and Lily c. 1932 (below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Oskar Kokoschka in his Studio, Paris' 1931-1932

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Oskar Kokoschka in his Studio, Paris (installation view)
1931-1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Kiki de Montparnasse and her Friends, Thérèse Treize and Lily' c. 1932 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Kiki de Montparnasse and her Friends, Thérèse Treize and Lily (installation view)
c. 1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing at left, Brassaï's 'Jean Genet' 1948

Installation views of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the bottom photograph at left, Brassaï’s Jean Genet 1948 (below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Jean Genet
1948
Gelatin silver print

Graffiti

The appreciation of graffiti as a powerful if anonymous art form began to blossom in the twentieth century. Like African tribal objects and the art of children, graffiti was admired as more expressive and vital than the refined forms of traditional Western art. Brassaï was among the first to embrace it. He was an inveterate magpie who collected all manner of neglected artefacts and natural specimens throughout his life. Virtually as soon as he began making photographs, he used the medium to collect the graffiti that appeared abundantly on the walls of Paris – predominantly images that had been scratched or gouged rather than drawn or painted and, as he pointed out, in which irregularities of the wall itself played a role. He compiled hundreds of these pictures, a small sample of which is presented here.

Minotaure

Between arriving in Paris in early 1924 and taking up photography six years later, Brassaï developed a wide circle of friends among the international community of artists and writers in Montparnasse. Among them were Les deux aveugles (The Two Blind Men), as the art critics Maurice Raynal and E. Tériade called themselves. In December 1932 – the same month Brassaï’s book Paris de unit (Paris at Night) appeared – Tériade invited Brassaï to photograph Pablo Picasso and his studios in and near Paris for the first issue of Minotaure, a lavish art magazine launched in June 1933 by the Swiss published Albert Skira. Thus began one of the key friendships of Brassaï’s life. Over the next few years he played prominent role in Minotaure, notable as a collaborator of Salvador Dalí, as an illustrator of texts by André Breton, and, on a few occasions, as an artist in his own right.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Foam, Amsterdam showing to the right, photographs from Brassaï's series 'Graffiti'

Installation views of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing to the right, photographs from Brassaï’s series Graffiti
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Minotaure, nos. 3-4 (December 1933)
Pages 6-7: Photographs and text by Brassaï, “Du mur des cavernes au mur d’usine” (From the Wall of the Caves to the Wall of the Factory).
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

This was the first appearance in print of Brassaï’s series Graffiti.

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'The Sun King' 1945-1950 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
The Sun King (installation view)
1945-1950
From the series Graffiti
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassai. 'Untitled' from the series 'Graffiti' 1950

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Untitled (installation view)
1950
From the series Graffiti
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassai. 'Untitled' from the series 'Graffiti' 1945-1955

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Untitled (installation view)
1945-1955
From the series Graffiti
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from the section Personages including at left La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre 1932; and in the centre, Billiard Player, boulevard Rochechouart 1932-1933 and Market Porter, Les Halles 1939
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Personages

In the introduction to a book of his photographs that was published in 1949, Brassaï linked the modern arts of photography and film to the work of artists of the past who had depicted everyday life, among them Rembrandt van Rijn, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He praised them for the “desire to get beyond the anecdotal and to promote [their] subjects to the dignity of types.” Brassaï himself had a talent for rendering at the same time a generic social role and a particular individual who inhabited it, as if his attentiveness to the person would elevate him or her into a distinctive personage.

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from the section Personages including at left, Festival in Seville 1951; and at right, La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre 1932
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from the section Personages including at left, Festival in Seville 1951; at centre, La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre 1932; and at right, Billiard Player, boulevard Rochechouart 1932-1933
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing a photograph from the section Personages, La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre 1932
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre' 1932 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre (installation view)
1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre
1932
Gelatin silver print

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from the section Personages including at left La Môme Bijou, Bar de la Lune, Montmartre 1932; and at right, Billiard Player, boulevard Rochechouart 1932-1933
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Billiard Player, boulevard Rochechouart' 1932-33 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Billiard Player, boulevard Rochechouart (installation view)
1932-1933
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Billiard Player, boulevard Rochechouart
1932-1933
Gelatin silver print

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from the section Personages including at left Billiard Player, boulevard Rochechouart 1932-1933; and at right, Market Porter, Les Halles 1939
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Market Porter, Les Halles' 1939 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Market Porter, Les Halles (installation view)
1939
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Bal des Quatre Saisons, rue de Lappe
c. 1932
Gelatin silver print

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Chez Suzy
1931-1932
Gelatin silver print

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'At the Hôtel des Terrasses' c. 1932 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
At the Hôtel des Terrasses (installation view)
c. 1932
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from Brassaï’s series Sleep
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Sleep

In 1945 Brassaï wrote a brief essay to accompany some of his pictures of sleepers. It reads in part “All things that stand against their inclination – a tree, a column, a tower, a rock – are regarded with a malign eye by gravity … She especially has a grudge against man, that foolhardy being who, in open collusion with the sunlight, alone among his brothers under the spell of gravitation, dares to stand up. For sunlight and gravity fight over living beings, the one turning over what the other has put up. Alas! Sunlight lives a long way away and can never be found when she is needed the most. Thus gravity is suited to have the last word.”

Installation view of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from Brassaï’s series Sleep with at left, Paris c. 1934; and at centre, Sleeping c. 1935
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Paris' c. 1934 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Paris (installation view)
c. 1934
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984) 'Sleeping' c. 1935 (installation view)

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Sleeping (installation view)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (French, 1899-1984)
Montmartre
1930-1931
Gelatin silver print

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European photographic research tour: V&A Photography Centre, London

Visited October 2019 posted May 2020

Unknown photographer. 'Photograph of Allied War exhibition, Serbian Section, V&A' 1917 (installation view)

Unknown photographer
Photograph of Allied War exhibition, Serbian Section, V&A (installation view)
1917
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The older I grow, the more exponentially I appreciate and love these early photographs. Imagine having a collection like this!

Wonderful to see Edward Steichen’s Portrait – Lady H (1908, below) as I have a copy of Camera Work 22 in my collection.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

All iPhone images © Dr Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

The V&A has been collecting photographs since 1856, the year the Museum was founded, and it was one of the first museums to present photography exhibitions. Since then the collection has grown to be one of the largest and most important in the world, comprising around 500,000 images. The V&A is now honoured to have added the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) collection to its holdings, which contains around 270,000 photographs, an extensive library, and 6,000 cameras and pieces of equipment associated with leading artists and photographic pioneers.

Take a behind-the-scenes look at our world class photography collection following the transfer of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) Collection, which has enabled a dramatic reimagining of the way photography is presented at the V&A. The photographs curators introduce a series of five highlights that are on display in the new Photography Centre, which opened on 12th October 2018. The first phase of the centre will more than double the space dedicated to photography at the Museum.

Text from the V&A and YouTube websites

Unknown photographer. 'Photograph of Allied War exhibition, Serbian Section, V&A' 1917

The V&A has been collecting and exhibiting photographs since the 1850s. This image shows part o a photographic exhibition held over 100 years ago in the same galleries you are standing in today. The exhibition presented a densely packed display of images depicting the Allied Powers during the First World War.

Installation view of the V&A Photography Centre, London

Wall text from the V&A Photography Centre, London

Installation views of the V&A Photography Centre, London
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (French, 1765-1833) 'Christ Carrying his Cross' 1827 (installation view)

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (French, 1765-1833)
Christ Carrying his Cross (installation views)
1827
Heliograph on pewter plate
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

The French inventor Niépce made the earliest surviving photographic images, which he called ‘heliographs’ or ‘sun-writing’. Only 16 are thought to still exist. Although Niépce experimented with light-sensitive plates inside a camera, he made most of his images, including this one, by placing engravings of works by other artists directly onto a metal plate. He would probably have had the resulting heliographs coated in ink and printed.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (French, 1765-1833)
Christ Carrying his Cross (installation view)
1827
Heliograph on pewter plate
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-70) and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-48) 'The Adamson Family' 1843-1845 (installation view)

David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848)
The Adamson Family (installation view)
1843-1845
Salted paper print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The partnership between Scottish painter Hill and chemist Adamson merged the art and science of photography. The pair initially intended to create preliminary studies for Hill’s paintings, but soon recognised photography’s artistic potential. With Hill’s knowledge of composition and lighting, and Adamson’s considerable sensitivity and dexterity in handling the camera, together they produced some of the most accomplished photographic portraits of their time.

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-77) 'The Haystack' 1844 from the V&A Photography Centre, London 2019

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877)
The Haystack
1844
From The Pencil of Nature
Salted paper print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum

Benjamin Brecknell Turner (British, 1815-94) 'Hedgerow Trees, Clerkenleap' 1852-1854 (installation view)

Benjamin Brecknell Turner (British, 1815-1894)
Hedgerow Trees, Clerkenleap (installation views)
1852-1854
Albumen print; Calotype negative
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Turner took out a licence to practice ‘calotype’ photography from Talbot in 1848. He contact-printed positive images from paper negatives. The negative (below) and its corresponding positive (above) are reunited here to illustrate this process, but the pairing as you see them would not have been the photographer’s original intention for display. Although unique negatives were sometimes exhibited in their own right, only showing positive prints was the norm.

Benjamin Brecknell Turner (British, 1815-1894)
Hedgerow Trees, Clerkenleap (installation view)
1852-1854
Albumen print; Calotype negative
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-84) 'The Road to Chailly, Forest of Fontainebleau' 1852 (installation view)

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
The Road to Chailly, Forest of Fontainebleau (installation view)
1852
Albumen print from a collodion glass negative
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of the V&A Photography Centre, London
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-84) 'The Marseillaise (The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792), by Francois Rude, 1833-35, Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile, Paris' 1852 (installation view)

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
The Marseillaise (The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792), by Francois Rude, 1833-35, Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile, Paris (installation view)
1852
Albumen print
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) 'The Marseillaise (The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792), by Francois Rude, 1833-1835, Arc de Triomphe de l’Etoile, Paris' 1852 (installation view)

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) 'Parian Vase, Grapes and Silver Cup' 1860 (installation view)

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869)
Parian Vase, Grapes and Silver Cup (installation view)
1860
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Fenton was one of the most versatile and technically brilliant photographers of the 19th century. He excelled at many subjects, including war photography, portraiture, architecture and landscape. He also made a series of lush still lives. Here, grapes, plums and peaches are rendered in exquisite detail, and the silver cup on the right reflects a camera tripod.

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869)
Parian Vase, Grapes and Silver Cup (installation view)
1860
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) 'Parian Vase, Grapes and Silver Cup' 1860 (installation view detail)

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869)
Parian Vase, Grapes and Silver Cup (installation view detail)
1860
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) 'Still Life with Fruit and Decanter' 1860 from the V&A Photography Centre, London 2019

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869)
Still Life with Fruit and Decanter
1860
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum

Oscar Gustaf Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875) 'Head of St John the Baptist on a Charger' c. 1856 (installation view)

Oscar Gustaf Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875)
Head of St John the Baptist on a Charger (installation view)
c. 1856
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Rejlander probably intended this photograph to be part of a larger composition telling the biblical story of Salome, in which the severed head of John the Baptist was presented to her on a plate. Rejlander never made the full picture, however, and instead produced multiple prints of the head alone.

Oscar Gustaf Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-75) 'Head of St John the Baptist on a Charger' c. 1856 (installation view)

Francis Frith (British, 1822-1898) 'Th', from Egypt, Sinai, and Jerusalem: A Series of Twenty Photographic Views by Francis Frith 1858 (published 1860 or 1862) (installation view)

Francis Frith (British, 1822-1898)
The Pyramids of Dahshoor [Dahshur], from the East, from Egypt, Sinai, and Jerusalem: A Series of Twenty Photographic Views by Francis Frith (installation view)
1858 (published 1860 or 1862)
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Frith’s photographs were popular and circulated widely, both because of their architectural interest and because they often featured sites mentioned in the Bible. Photographs of places described in biblical stories brought a new level of realism to a Christian Victorian audience, previously only available through the interpretations of a painter or illustrator.

Francis Frith (British, 1822-98) 'The Pyramids of Dahshoor [Dahshur], from the East, from Egypt, Sinai, and Jerusalem: A Series of Twenty Photographic Views by Francis Frith' 1858 (published 1860 or 1862) from the V&A Photography Centre, London 2019

Francis Frith (British, 1822-1898)
The Pyramids of Dahshoor [Dahshur], from the East, from Egypt, Sinai, and Jerusalem: A Series of Twenty Photographic Views by Francis Frith
1858 (published 1860 or 1862)
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the V&A Photography Centre, London
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) 'Solar Effect in the Clouds – Ocean' 1856-1859 (installation view)

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Solar Effect in the Clouds – Ocean (installation view)
1856-1859
Albumen Print
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Solar Effect in the Clouds – Ocean
1856-1859
Albumen Print
Art Institute of Chicago
Creative Commons Zero (CC0)

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) 'The Imperial Yacht, La Reine Hortense, Le Havre' 1856-1857 (installation view)

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
The Imperial Yacht, La Reine Hortense, Le Havre (installation view)
1856-1857
Albumen print
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
The Imperial Yacht, La Reine Hortense, Le Havre
1856-1857
Albumen print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Public domain

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884) 'Pavilion Richelieu, Louvre, Paris' 1857-1859 (installation view)

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
Pavilion Richelieu, Louvre, Paris (installation view)
1857-1859
Albumen print
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) 'Balaclava from Guard’s Hill, the Crimea' 1855 (installation view)

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869)
Balaclava from Guard’s Hill, the Crimea (installation view)
1855
Albumen print
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Roger Fenton (British, 1819-69)
Balaclava from Guard’s Hill, the Crimea (installation view)
1855
Albumen print
Bequeathed to the V&A by Chauncey Hare Townshend
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) 'Lucia' 1864-1865 (installation view)

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, born India, 1815-1879)
Lucia (installation view)
1864-1865
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Charles Lutwide Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll)(British, 1832-1898) 'Tea Merchant (On Duty)' and 'Tea Merchant (Off Duty)' 1873 (installation view)

Charles Lutwide Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll)(British, 1832-1898)
Tea Merchant (On Duty) and Tea Merchant (Off Duty) (installation view)
1873
Albumen prints
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lewis Carroll is best known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but he was also an accomplished amateur photographer. Approximately half of his photographs are portraits of children, sometimes wearing foreign costumes or acting out scenes. Here, Alexandra ‘Xie’ Kitchen, his most frequent child sitter, poses in Chinese dress on a stack of tea chests.

Charles Lutwide Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll)(British, 1832-1898) 'Tea Merchant (On Duty)' 1873 (installation view)

Charles Lutwide Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll)(British, 1832-1898)
Tea Merchant (On Duty) (installation view)
1873
Albumen prints
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Charles Lutwide Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll)(British, 1832-1898) 'Tea Merchant (Off Duty)' 1873 (installation view)

Charles Lutwide Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll)(British, 1832-1898)
Tea Merchant (Off Duty) (installation view)
1873
Albumen prints
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, born India, 1815-1879) 'Pomona' 1887 (installation view)

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, born India, 1815-1879)
Pomona (installation view)
1887
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The South Kensington museum (now the V&A) was the only museum to collect and exhibit Julia Margaret Cameron’s during her lifetime. This is one of several studies she made of Alice Liddell, who as a child had modelled for the author and photographer Lewis Carroll and inspired his novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Cameron, Carroll and Liddell moved in overlapping artistic and intellectual circles. Here, surrounded by foliage, a grown-up Alice poses as the Roman goddess of orchards and gardens.

Julia Margaret Cameron (British, born India, 1815-1879)
Pomona (installation view)
1887
Albumen print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the V&A Photography Centre, London
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Alvin Langdon Coburn (American 1882-1966) 'Frederick Holland Day' 1900 (installation view)

Alvin Langdon Coburn (American 1882-1966)
Frederick Holland Day (installation view)
1900
Gum platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The British-American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn enjoyed success on both sides of the Atlantic. Active in the early 20th century, he gained recognition from a young age as a talented photographer. His style ranged from the painterly softness of Pictorialism to the unusual vantage points and abstraction of Modernism. As well as being a practising photographer, Coburn was an avid collector. In 1930 he donated over 600 photographs to the Royal Photographic Society. The gift included examples of Coburn’s own work alongside that of his contemporaries, many of whom are now considered to be the most influential of their generation. Coburn also collected historic photographs, and was among the first in his time to rediscover and appreciate the work of 19th-century masters like Julia Margaret Cameron and Hill and Adamson.

Fredrick Holland Day (American, 1864-1933) 'Head of a Girl, Hampton, Virginia' 1905 (installation view)

Fredrick Holland Day (American, 1864-1933)
Head of a Girl, Hampton, Virginia (installation view)
1905
Gum platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Day made this portrait when he visited the Hampton Institute in Virginia, which was founded after the American Civil War as a teacher-training school for freed slaves. The institute’s camera club invited Day to visit the school and critique the work of its students. Day’s friend and fellow photographer, Frederick Evans, donated this strikingly modern composition to the Royal Photographic Society in 1937.

Fredrick Holland Day (American, 1864-1933)
Head of a Girl, Hampton, Virginia
1905
Gum platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934)
The Letter
1906
Platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum

Käsebier studied painting before opening a photography studio in New York. Her Pictorialist photographs often combine soft focus with experimental printing techniques. These sisters were dressed in historic costume for a ball, but their pose transforms a society portrait into a narrative picture. In a variant image, they turn to look at the framed silhouette on the wall.

Installation views of the V&A Photography Centre, London
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Francis James Mortimer (British, 1874-1944) 'Alvin Langdon Coburn at the Opening of His One-Man Exhibition the Royal Photographic Society, London' 1906 (installation view)

Francis James Mortimer (British, 1874-1944)
Alvin Langdon Coburn at the Opening of His One-Man Exhibition the Royal Photographic Society, London (installation view)
1906
Carbon print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Annie Wardrope Brigman (American, 1869-1950)
The Spirit of Photography
c. 1908
Platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum

Alvin Langdon Coburn (American 1882-1966) 'Kensington Gardens' 1910 (installation view)

Alvin Langdon Coburn (American 1882-1966)
Kensington Gardens (installation view)
1910
Platinum print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Cover of Camera Work Number XXVI (installation view)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) 'Portrait – Lady H' 1908 from 'Camerwork 22'

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
Portrait – Lady H (installation view)
1908
Camera Work 22
1908
Photogravure
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
Portrait – Lady H
1908
Camera Work 22
1908
Photogravure
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) 'New York' 1916 from 'Camerwork 48' (installation view)

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
New York (installation view)
1916
Camera Work 48
1916
Photogravure
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) was an American photographer, publisher, writer and gallery owner. From 1903-1917, he published the quarterly journal Camera Work, which featured portfolios of exquisitely printed photogravures (a type of photograph printed in ink), alongside essays and reviews. Camera Work promoted photography as an art form, publishing the work of Pictorialist photographers who drew inspiration from painting, and reproducing 19th-century photographs. It also helped to introduce modern art to American audiences, including works by radical European painters such as Matisse and Picasso.

Alvin Langdon Coburn (American 1882-1966) 'Vortograph' 1917 (installation view)

Alvin Langdon Coburn (American 1882-1966)
Vortograph (installation view)
1917
Bromide print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Rudolph Koppitz (American, 1884-1936)
Bewegungsstudie (Movement Study)
1926
Carbon print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum

Koppitz was a leading art photographer in Vienna between the two World Wars, as well as a master of complex printing processes, including the pigment, gum and broccoli process of transfer printing. Tis dynamic and sensual composition captures dancers from the Vienna State Opera Ballet frozen mid-movement.

Herbert Bayer (Austrian American, 1900-1985) 'Shortly Before Dawn' 1932-1939 (installation view)

Herbert Bayer (Austrian American, 1900-85)
Shortly Before Dawn (installation view)
1932-39
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Bayer had a varied and influential career as a designer, painter, photographer, sculptor, art director and architect. He taught at the Bauhaus school in Dessau, Germany, and later began to use photomontage, both in his artistic and advertising work. Using this process, he combined his photographs with found imagery, producing surreal or dreamlike pictures.

Bernard Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) 'Reguliersbreestraat, Amsterdam' 1934 (installation view)

Bernard Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951)
Reguliersbreestraat, Amsterdam (installation view)
1934
Foto-choma Eilers
Given by Joan Luckhurst Eilers
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In the 1930s, the Dutch photographer Bernard Eilers developed an experimental new photographic colour separation process known as ‘Foto-chroma Eilers’. Although the process was short-lived, Eilers successfully used this technique to produce prints like this of great intensity and depth of colour. Here, the misty reflections and neon lights create an atmospheric but modern view of a rain-soaked Amsterdam at night.

Bernard Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951)
Reguliersbreestraat, Amsterdam (installation view)
1934
Foto-choma Eilers
Given by Joan Luckhurst Eilers
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) 'Valentine to Charis' 1935 (installation view)

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Valentine to Charis (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

When Weston met the model and writer Charis Wilson in 1934, he was immediately besotted. This valentine to her contains a cluster of objects arranged as a still life, including the photographer’s camera lens and spectacles. Some of the objects seem to hold a special significance that only the lovers could understand. The numbers on the right possibly refer to their ages – there were almost thirty years between them.

Horst P. Horst (German-American, 1906-1999) 'Portrait of Gabrielle ('Coco') Chanel' 1937 (installation view)

Horst P. Horst (German-American, 1906-1999)
Portrait of Gabrielle (‘Coco’) Chanel
1937
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum

Variant, American Vogue, 1 December 1937, p. 86: ‘Fashion: Mid-Season Prophecies’

Caption reads: Chanel in her fitted, three-quarters coat / Mademoiselle Chanel, in one of her new coats that are making the news – a three quarters coat buttoned tightly and trimmed with astrakham like her cap. 01/12/1937

Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965) 'Women with headscarf, 'McCall’s' Cover, July 1938' 1938 (installation view)

Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965)
Women with headscarf, McCall’s Cover, July 1938 (installation view)
1938
Tricolour carbro print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) 'Hardware Store' 1938 (installation view)

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Hardware Store (installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Between 1935 and 1939, the Federal Art Project emptied Abbott to make a series of photographs entitled Changing New York, documenting the rapid development and urban transformation of the city. This picture shows the facade of a downtown hardware store, its wares arranged in a densely-packed window display with extend onto the pavement.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Hardware Store (installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Hardware Store
1938
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) 'Photographs of African masks, from an exhibition entitled African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York' 1935 (installation view)

Walker Evans (American, 1903-75)
Photographs of African masks, from an exhibition entitled African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver prints
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art commissioned Evans to photograph objects in its major exhibition of African art. Using his 8 x 10 inch view camera, he highlighted the artistry and detail of the objects, alternating between front, side and rear views. In total, Evans produced 477 images, and 17 complete sets of them were printed. Several of these sets were donated to colleges and libraries in America, and the V&A bought one set in 1936 to better represent African art in its collection.

The term ‘negro’ is given here in its original historical context.

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) 'Photograph of African mask, from an exhibition entitled African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York' 1935 (installation view)

Walker Evans (American, 1903-75)
Photograph of African mask, from an exhibition entitled African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (installation view)
1935
Gelatin silver prints
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Bill Brandt (British, 1904-1983) 'Dubuffet’s Right Eye, Alberto Giacometti’s Left Eye, Louise Nevelson’s Eye, Max Ernst’s Left Eye' 1960-1963 (installation view)

Bill Brandt (British, 1904-1983)
Dubuffet’s Right Eye
Alberto Giacometti’s Left Eye
Louise Nevelson’s Eye
Max Ernst’s Left Eye (installation view)
1960-1963
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Bill Brandt (British, 1904-1983) 'Dubuffet’s Right Eye' 1960-1963 (installation view)

Bill Brandt (British, 1904-83)
Dubuffet’s Right Eye (installation view)
1960-1963
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

German-born Brandt moved to London in the 1930s. In his long and varied career, he made many compelling portraits of people including Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, the Sitwell family, Robert Graves and E.M. Forster. For this series he photographed the eyes of well-known artists over several years, creating a substantial collection of intense and unique portraits. The pictures play upon ideas of artistic vision and the camera lens, which acts as a photographer’s ‘mechanical eye’.

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Simple Still Life, Egg' 1950 (installation view)

Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976)
Simple Still Life, Egg (installation view)
1950
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Throughout his career, Sudek used various photographic styles but always conveyed an intensely lyrical vision of the world. Here, his formal approach to a simple still life presents a poetic statement, and evokes an atmosphere of contemplation. Sudek’s motto and advice to his students – ‘hurry slowly’ – encapsulates his legendary patience and the sense of meditative stillness in his photographs.

Otto Steiner (German, 1915-1978) 'Luminogram' 1952 (installation view)

Otto Steiner (German, 1915-1978)
Luminogram (installation view)
1952
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Mark Cohen (American, b. 1943) 'True Color' 1974-1987 (installation view)

Mark Cohen (American, b. 1943)
True Color (installation views)
1974-1987
Portfolio of thirty dye transfer prints, printed in 2007
American Friends of the V&A through the generosity of The Michael G. and C. Jane Wilson 2007 Trust
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Known for his dynamic street photography, Cohen’s work presents a fragmented, sensory image of his hometown of Wiles-Barre, Pennsylvania. This set of pictures was taken at a time when colour photography was just beginning to be recognised as a fine art. Until the 1970s, colour had largely been associated with other advertising or family snapshots, and was not thought of as a legitimate medium for artists. Cohen and other photographers like William Eggleston transferred this perception using the dye-transfer printing process. Although complicated and time-consuming, the technique results in vibrant and high quality colour prints.

Mark Cohen (American, b. 1943) 'True Color' 1974-1987 (installation view detail)

Mark Cohen (American, b. 1943)
True Color (installation view detail)
1974-1987
Portfolio of thirty dye transfer prints, printed in 2007
American Friends of the V&A through the generosity of The Michael G. and C. Jane Wilson 2007 Trust
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Graham Smith (British, b. 1947) 'What she wanted & who she got' 1982 (installation view)

Graham Smith (British, b. 1947)
What she wanted & who she got (installation view)
1982
Gelatin silver print
The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the V&A Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Since the 1980s, Graham Smith has been photographing his hometown of South Bank near Middlesbrough. His images convey his deep sensitivity towards the effects of changing working conditions on the former industrial north-east. In this photograph, despite the suggested humour of the title, we are left wondering who the couple are and what the nature of their relationship might be.

Jan Kempenaers (b. 1968) 'Spomenik #3' 2006

Jan Kempenaers (Belgian, b. 1968)
Spomenik #3
2006
C-type print

The Kosmaj monument in Serbia is dedicated to soldiers of the Kosmaj Partisan detachment from World War II.

Jan Kempenaers (b. 1968) 'Spomenik #4' 2007

Jan Kempenaers (Belgian, b. 1968)
Spomenik #4
2007
C-type print

This monument, authored by sculptor Miodrag Živković, commemorates the Battle of Sutjeska, one of the bloodiest battles of World War II in the former Yugoslavia.

Kempenaers toured the balkans photographing ‘Spomeniks’ – monuments built in former Yugoslavia in the 1960s and ’70s on the sites of Second World War battles and concentration camps. Some have been vandalised in outpourings of anger against the former regime, while others are well maintained. In Kempenaers’ photographs, the monuments appear otherworldly, as if dropped from outer space into a pristine landscape.

Installation view of the V&A Photography Centre, London
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Victoria and Albert Museum
Cromwell Road
London
SW7 2RL
Phone: +44 (0)20 7942 2000

Opening hours:
Daily 10.00 – 17.45
Friday 10.00 – 22.00

V&A website

V&A Photography Centre website

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Exhibition: ‘Dora Maar’ at Tate Modern, London

Exhibition dates: 20th November 2019 – 15th March 2020

Curators: Dora Maar is curated by Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Damarice Amao, Assistant Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Amanda Maddox, Associate Curator, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles with Emma Lewis, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The Tate Modern presentation is curated by Emma Lewis, Assistant Curator with Emma Jones, Curatorial Assistant, Tate Modern.

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Untitled (Hand-Shell)
1934
Gelatin silver print on paper
401 x 289 mm
Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris
Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais
Image Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019

What a creative woman. But yet another abused by the ego of a male, that of her lover, Picasso.

Beth Gersh-Nesic observes, “Was Dora Maar’s brilliant career cut short by the typical conflicts facing professional women in the 1930s, and even today? Or was she a victim of Picasso’s psychological abuse, which chipped away at her original confidence? Was she compromised to the point that she only wanted to please the man she loved? According to art historian John Richardson, Dora Maar sacrificed her gifts on the altar of her art god, her idol, Picasso. Based on the early Surrealist photographs we see in her retrospective, one can only wish she hadn’t taken up with Picasso, for it seems she might have achieved far more in her lifetime without him.”

What we can say is that Maar left behind a strong body of photographic work – from fashion and commercial, to restrained, classical formalism with surrealist inflections; from street photography to “the stuff of delirium and nightmare, [which] taps into the unconscious, internalised sublime”, her Portrait of Ubu (1936, below) reminding me strongly of William Blake’s painting The Ghost of a Flea (c. 1819). Ubu is “a ghastly being of indeterminate origin and melancholy aspect… [an idea] something like l’informe, the concept Maar’s lover Georges Bataille coined to describe his fellow-Surrealists’ admiration for all things larval and grotesquely about-to-be.” Ubu is a her dark notion of a street “urchin”.

Her warped photomontages are technical marvels. “”She captures the mysterious,” Caws wrote, “in a combination of the unresolved and the sharply angled. This frequently creates a sense of ambiguity, even menace.” Caws notes that Dora Maar responded to Louis Aragon’s invocation “for each person there is one image to find that will disturb the whole universe.” Maar’s images managed to “disturb and reveal” with a bit of the macabre mixed in.”

But her images are more than a bit of this and a bit of that. They possess a utilitarian feeling in the enunciation of their menace, which makes them all the more effective when impinging on our waking dreams. Susan Sontag notes, “Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognise as modern” (Sontag, On Photography, p. 2). Thicken is the critical word. Maar’s photographs thicken our atmospheric (and mental) miasma, prescient of our modern world full of dark passages: pitch black sewers, fatbergs, drone strikes, bush fire skies, virus, murder and mayhem. In the back of my head. My eyes. Roll, roll, roll. Skewered. Roasted.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Tate Britain for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

The most accomplished examples of Maar’s art are the photomontages of 1935 and 1936. There were already many vaults and arches in her Mont-Saint-Michel pictures; now she took the cloistral galleries of the Orangerie at Versailles, upended them so that they looked like sewers, and populated them with cryptic beings engaged in arcane rituals or dramas. In “The Simulator,” [below] a boy from one of her street photographs is bent backward at an obscene angle; Maar has retouched his eyes so that they roll back in his head toward us, like one of those thrashing hysterics photographed in the nineteenth century. In “29 Rue d’Astorg” (below) – of which Maar made several versions, black-and-white and hand-coloured – a human figure with a curtailed, avian head is seated beneath arches that have been subtly warped in the darkroom.

Brian Dillon. “The Voraciousness and Oddity of Dora Maar’s Pictures,” on The New Yorker website May 21, 2019 [Online] Cited 23/11/2019

During the 1930s, Dora Maar’s provocative photomontages became celebrated icons of surrealism.

Her eye for the unusual also translated to her commercial photography, including fashion and advertising, as well as to her social documentary projects. In Europe’s increasingly fraught political climate, Maar signed her name to numerous left-wing manifestos – a radical gesture for a woman at that time.

Her relationship with Pablo Picasso had a profound effect on both their careers. She documented the creation of his most political work, Guernica 1937. He painted her many times, including Weeping Woman 1937. Together they made a series of portraits combining experimental photographic and printmaking techniques.

In middle and later life Maar withdrew from photography. She concentrated on painting and found stimulation and solace in poetry, religion, and philosophy, returning to her darkroom only in her seventies.

This exhibition will explore the breadth of Maar’s long career in the context of work by her contemporaries.

Text from the Tate Modern website

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Woman sitting in profile, the bust dressed in a blouse made of tattoo patterns drawn on the photograph
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
Private Collection
© Estate of Dora Maar / DACS 2019, All Rights Reserved

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Child with a Beret
c. 1932
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy VEGAP / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Barcelona, Saleswomen in the Butcher Shop
1933
Silver Gelatin Print
48.7 x 38.8cm
Private Collection
© Adagp, Paris 2019
Photo: © Fotogasull

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Blind Street Peddler, Barcelona
1933
Gelatin silver print
Image: 39.3 x 29.3cm (15 1/2 x 11 9/16 in.)
Gift of David Raymond
The Cleveland Museum of Art
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Street Boy on the Corner of the rue de Genets
1933
Gelatin silver print
Harvard Art Museums/ Fogg Museum, Richard and Ronay Menschel Fund for the Acquisition of Photographs
© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand
1934
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 24.3 × 18cm (9 9/16 × 7 1/16 in.)
© Dora Maar Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
Gift of David and Marcia Raymond

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Stairwell and Plants in Kew Gardens
1934
Gelatin silver print, ferrotyped
Image: 28 x 24cm (11 x 9 7/16 in.)
John L. Severance Fund
The Cleveland Museum of Art
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Pearly King collecting money for the Empire Day
1935
Gelatin silver print
Tate
© Estate of Dora Maar / DACS 2019, All Rights Reserved

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Carousel at Night
1931-1936
Gelatin silver print, ferrotyped
Image: 25 x 19.8cm (9 13/16 x 7 13/16 in.)
John L. Severance Fund
The Cleveland Museum of Art
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Installation views of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing, in the bottom image, the photographs Untitled (Nude) 1930s (left) and Untitled (Nude) c. 1938 (right)

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Assia
1934
Gelatin silver print
26.4 x 19.5cm

This autumn, Tate Modern presents the first UK retrospective of the work of Dora Maar (1907-1997) whose provocative photographs and photomontages became celebrated icons of surrealism. Featuring over 200 works from a career spanning more than six decades, this exhibition shows how Maar’s eye for the unusual also translated to her commercial commissions, social documentary photographs, and paintings – key aspects of her practice which have, until now, remained little known.

Born Henriette Théodora Markovitch, Dora Maar grew up between Argentina and Paris and studied decorative arts and painting before switching her focus to photography. In doing so, Maar became part of a generation of women who seized the new professional opportunities offered by advertising and the illustrated press. Tate Modern’s exhibition will open with the most important examples of these commissioned works. Around 1931, Maar set up a studio with film set designer Pierre Kéfer specialising in portraiture, fashion photography and advertising. Works such as Untitled (Les années vous guettent) c. 1935 – believed to be an advertising project for face cream that Maar made by overlaying two negatives – will reveal Maar’s innovative approach to constructing images through staging, photomontage and collage. Striking nude studies such as that of famed model Assia Granatouroff will also reveal how women photographers like Maar were beginning to infiltrate relatively taboo genres such as erotica and nude photography.

During the 1930s, Maar was active in left-wing revolutionary groups led by artists and intellectuals. Reflecting this, her street photography from this time shot in Barcelona, Paris and London captured the reality of life during Europe’s economic depression. Maar shared these politics with the surrealists, becoming one of the few photographers to be included in the movement’s exhibitions and publications. A major highlight of the show will be outstanding examples of this area of Maar’s practice, including Portrait d’Ubu 1936, an enigmatic image thought to be an armadillo foetus, and the renowned photomontages 29, rue d’Astorg c. 1936 and Le Simulateur 1935. Collages and publications by André Breton, Georges Hugnet, Paul and Nusch Eluard, and Jacqueline Lamba will place Maar’s work in context with that of her inner circle.

In the winter of 1935-1936 Maar met Pablo Picasso and their relationship of around eight years had a profound effect on both their careers. She documented the creation of his most political work Guernica 1937, offering unprecedented insight into his working process. He in turn immortalised her in the motif of the ‘weeping woman’. Together they made a series of portraits that combined experimental photographic and printmaking techniques, anticipating her energetic return to painting in 1936. Featuring rarely seen, privately-owned canvases such as La Conversation 1937 and La Cage 1943, and never-before exhibited negatives from the Dora Maar collection at the Musée National d’art Moderne, the exhibition will shed new light on the dynamic between these two artists during the turbulent wartime years.

After the Second World War, Maar began dividing her time between Paris and the South of France. During this period, she explored diverse subject matter and styles before focusing on gestural, abstract paintings of the landscape surrounding her home. Though these works were exhibited to acclaim in London and Paris into the 1950s, Maar gradually withdrew from artistic circles. As a result, the second half of her life became shrouded in mystery and speculation. The exhibition will reunite over 20 works from this little-known – yet remarkably prolific – period. Dora Maar concludes with a substantial group of camera-less photographs that she made in the 1980s when, four decades after all but abandoning the medium, Maar returned to her darkroom.

Dora Maar is curated by Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Damarice Amao, Assistant Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Amanda Maddox, Associate Curator, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles with Emma Lewis, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The Tate Modern presentation is curated by Emma Lewis, Assistant Curator with Emma Jones, Curatorial Assistant, Tate Modern.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue jointly published by Tate and the J. Paul Getty Museum and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.

Press release from Tate Britain [Online] Cited 16/11/2019

Installation views of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing at second left, Untitled (Study of Beauty) (c. 1931, below)

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Untitled (Study of Beauty)
c. 1931
Gelatin silver print
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Untitled (Lee Miller) (multiple exposure)
c. 1933
Gelatin silver print

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Untitled (Mannequin sitting in profile in dress and evening jacket)
c. 1932-1935
Gelatin silver print enhanced with colours
29.9 x 23.8cm
Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre de création industrielle
© ADAGP, Paris, 2019

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Untitled (Fashion photograph Model star)
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
300 x 200 mm
Collection Therond
© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Model in Swimsuit
1936
Gelatin silver on paper
197 x 167 mm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Portrait of Lise Deharme, chez elle devant sa cage a oiseaux
Portrait of Lise Deharme, at home in front of her birdcage
1936
Gelatin silver print

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Publicity Study, Pétrole Hahn
1934-1935
Silver gelatin print on a flexible support in cellulose nitrate
17.6 x 24cm
Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne Centre de création industrielle
© Adagp, Paris 2019
Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Dist. RMN-GP

Associated with Pierre Kéfer from 1930 to 1934, she collaborated in 1931 on the photographic illustration of the art historian Germain Bazin’s book Le Mont Saint-Michel (1935). She then shared a studio with Brassaï, after which Emmanuel Sougez, the spokesman for the New Photography movement, became her mentor. Her work met the aesthetic criteria of the time: close-ups of flowers and objects, and photograms in the style of Man Ray. She also took portraits, original publicity shots, and fashion and erotic photographs. In 1934, while traveling alone in Spain, Paris and London, she shot a vast number of urban views (posters, shop windows, ordinary people). Both a passionate lover and committed intellectual, she became the mistress of the filmmaker Louis Chavance and of the writer Georges Bataille, whom she met in a left-wing activist group. She signed the Contre-Attaque manifesto and rubbed shoulders with the agitprop artistic group Octobre. A close friend of Jacqueline Lamba, who became Breton’s wife, she was fully involved in the surrealist group, of whose members she made many portraits. At the height of her creativity in 1935-1936, she composed strange and bold photomontages, the most famous being 29, rue d’Astorg and The Simulator (both below). Some of her compositions verge on eroticism, like the photomontage showing fingers crawling out of a shell and sensually digging into the sand (Untitled, 1933-1934, top). She also used her city photographs as backdrops for unsettling scenes: her Portrait of Ubu (1936, below) – in fact the picture of an armadillo foetus – conforms to the surrealists’ fascination for macabre and deformity.

Anne Reverseau. “Dora Maar,” from the Dictionnaire universel des créatrices on the Archives of Women Artists Research & Exhibitions website [Online] Cited 16/11/2019

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Les yeux (The eyes)
c. 1932-1935
Silver print on flexible media
29.5 x 23.5cm
© Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais
Image Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, © ADAGP, Paris

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Untitled
1935
Photomontage
232 x 150 mm
Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou (Paris, France)
© Estate of Dora Maar / DACS 2019, All Rights Reserved

When Maar began her career, the illustrated press was expanding quickly. This created a growing market for experimental photography. Maar embraced this opportunity, exploring the creative potential of staged images, darkroom experiments, collage and photomontage.

Most of Maar’s work had one thing in common: an uncanny atmosphere. Her connection to the surrealists led her to create fantastical images. This included using photomontage to bring together contrasting images and reflect the workings of the unconscious mind.

Unlike many other photomontage creators of this time, Maar did not use photographs taken from illustrated newspapers or magazines. Instead the images often came from her own work, including both street and landscape photography. This experimentation and obvious construction became a defining feature of Maar’s work.

Anonymous text from “Seven Things to Know: Dora Maar,” on the Tate website [Online] Cited 16/11/2019

Installation view of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing at second left, Arcade (1934, see below)

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Arcade
1934
Photomontage

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Danger
1936
Gelatin silver print

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
29 rue d’Astorg
c. 1936
Photograph, hand-coloured gelatin silver print on paper
294 x 244 mm
Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris. Musée national d’art moderne Centre de création industrielle
Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / P. Migeat / Dist. RMN-GP
© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
The Simulator
1936
Silver gelatin print printed on a carton
27 x 22.2cm (excluding the margin)
Gift from Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach in 1973
Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris Musée national d’art moderne, Centre de création industrielle
© Adagp, Paris 2019
Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / P. Migeat / Dist. RMN-GP

Maar’s early photomontages look almost as modish and styled as her fashion work. From a shell resting on sand, a dummy hand protrudes, with delicate fingers and painted nails, just like Maar’s own (see top image). In a way, the image could be by one of many photographers of the period – Cecil Beaton, say, or Angus McBean – who politely surrealised their pictures, as if the artistic movement were merely a visual style. Except: there is something ominously self-involved about this hybrid thing. The shell and hand recall Bataille’s obsessions with crustaceans, mollusks, and orphaned or butchered body parts. The hand rhymes with similar ones in the photographs of Claude Cahun, where they sometimes have masturbatory implications. And what are we to make of the storm-lit, gothic sky that looms over this auto-curious object?

The most accomplished examples of Maar’s art are the photomontages of 1935 and 1936. There were already many vaults and arches in her Mont-Saint-Michel pictures; now she took the cloistral galleries of the Orangerie at Versailles, upended them so that they looked like sewers, and populated them with cryptic beings engaged in arcane rituals or dramas. In “The Simulator,” (above) a boy from one of her street photographs is bent backward at an obscene angle; Maar has retouched his eyes so that they roll back in his head toward us, like one of those thrashing hysterics photographed in the nineteenth century. In “29 Rue d’Astorg” (above) – of which Maar made several versions, black-and-white and hand-coloured – a human figure with a curtailed, avian head is seated beneath arches that have been subtly warped in the darkroom.

Brian Dillon. “The Voraciousness and Oddity of Dora Maar’s Pictures,” on The New Yorker website May 21, 2019 [Online] Cited 23/11/2019

Dora Maar also participated in the Surrealists’ group exhibitions, such as the one at Charles Ratton’s Gallery in 1936, wherein her Portrait of Ubu became the “icon of Surrealism,” according to her biographer Mary Ann Caws in her exceptional book Picasso’s Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar (2000). “She captures the mysterious,” Caws wrote, “in a combination of the unresolved and the sharply angled. This frequently creates a sense of ambiguity, even menace.” (p. 20) Caws notes that Dora Maar responded to Louis Aragon’s invocation “for each person there is one image to find that will disturb the whole universe.” Maar’s images managed to “disturb and reveal” with a bit of the macabre mixed in. (p. 71)

Beth Gersh-Nesic. “Picasso’s Weeping Woman as Artist Instead of Muse: Dora Maar’s Retrospective at Centre Pompidou,” on the Bonjour Paris website July 24, 2019 [Online] Cited 23/11/2019

Installation view of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing Maar’s photographs Portrait of Ubu (1936, left), Untitled (Hand-Shell) (1934, top middle) and Danger (1936, bottom right) Photo: Tate (Andrew Dunkley)

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Portrait of Ubu
1936
Silver gelatin print
24 x 18cm
Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre de création industrielle
© Adagp, Paris
Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / P. Migeat / Dist. RMN-GP

In 1936, at the summit of her celebrity as a photographic artist, Dora Maar showed her picture “Portrait of Ubu” in the International Surrealist Exhibition, at the New Burlington Galleries, London. Named after a scatological, ur-Surrealist play by Alfred Jarry, from 1896, the black-and-white photograph shows a ghastly being of indeterminate origin and melancholy aspect. Maar would never say what the clawed, scaly creature was, nor where she had come across it. Her Ubu has elements of Jarry’s porcine, louse-like original, and, with its doleful eye and drooping ears, it also resembles an ass or an elephant. Scholars generally agree that the monster is in fact an armadillo foetus, preserved in a specimen jar. It is also an idea: something like l’informe, the concept Maar’s lover Georges Bataille coined to describe his fellow-Surrealists’ admiration for all things larval and grotesquely about-to-be.

Brian Dillon. “The Voraciousness and Oddity of Dora Maar’s Pictures,” on The New Yorker website May 21, 2019 [Online] Cited 23/11/2019

Installation view of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing her series of portrait photomontages from the mid-1930s (see below)

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Double Portrait with Hat
c. 1936-37
Gelatin silver print, montage with handwork on negative
Image: 29.8 x 23.8cm (11 3/4 x 9 3/8 in.)
Gift of David Raymond
The Cleveland Museum of Art
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

To produce this complex image, Maar sandwiched together two negatives of the same model, one frontal and one profile, scavenged from a magazine assignment on springtime hats, and painted the background and hat (or decomposing halo?) onto the negative. Softening the emulsion, she scraped and lifted it off, techniques that involve destruction and suggest disintegration. The face evokes Picasso’s depictions of female faces, especially his 1938 paintings of weeping women for which Maar was the model. Although the divided face is not Maar’s, it is tempting to interpret it as a reflection of her emotional state at the time, torn between her career and independence and Picasso’s demands and potent personality. frontal and one profile, scavenged from a magazine assignment on springtime hats, and painted the background and hat (or decomposing halo?) onto the negative. Softening the emulsion, she scraped and lifted it off, techniques that involve destruction and suggest disintegration. The face evokes Picasso’s depictions of female faces, especially his 1938 paintings of weeping women for which Maar was the model. Although the divided face is not Maar’s, it is tempting to interpret it as a reflection of her emotional state at the time, torn between her career and independence and Picasso’s demands and potent personality.

Text from The Cleveland Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 16/11/2019

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Profile portrait with glasses and hat
1930-1935
Gelatin silver print
© Dora Maar Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Man looking inside a sidewalk inspection door, London
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg, New York
Courtesy art2art Circulating Exhibitions
© Estate of Dora Maar / DACS 2019, All Rights Reserved

Maar became involved with the surrealists from 1933 and was one of the few artists – and even fewer women – to be included in the surrealists’ exhibitions. She became close to the group because of their shared left-wing politics at a time of social and civil unrest in France.

Maar’s photography and photomontages explore surrealist themes such as eroticism, sleep, the unconscious and the relationship between art and reality. Cropped frames, dramatic angles, unexpected juxtapositions and extreme close-ups are used to create surreal images. Contrasting with the idea of a photograph as a factual record, Maar’s scenes disorientate the viewer and create new worlds altogether.

Anonymous text from “Seven Things to Know: Dora Maar,” on the Tate website [Online] Cited 16/11/2019

Installation view of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing Maar’s photographs Portrait of Nusch Éluard (1935, left) and Les années vous guettent (The Years are Waiting for You) (1932, right)

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Portrait of Nusch Éluard
1935
Gelatin silver print

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Les années vous guettent (The Years are Waiting for You)
1932
Gelatin silver print
© Dora Maar Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Untitled
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print

Eileen Agar (British-Argentinian, 1899-1991)
Photograph of Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso on the beach
September 1937
Gelatin silver print
68 x 60 mm
Taken in Juan-les-pins, France
Tate Archive
Presented to Tate Archive by Eileen Agar in 1989 and transferred from the photograph collection in 2012

Eileen Agar (British-Argentinian, 1899-1991)
Photograph of Dora Maar, Nusch Éluard, Pablo Picasso and Paul Éluard on the beach
September 1937
Gelatin silver print
66 x 66 mm
Taken in Juan-les-pins, France
Tate Archive
Presented to Tate Archive by Eileen Agar in 1989 and transferred from the photograph collection in 2012

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Portrait of Picasso, Paris, studio 29, rue d’Astorg
Winter, 1935
Silver gelatin negative on flexible support in cellulose nitrate
12 x 9cm
Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris Musée national d’art moderne Centre de création industrielle
© Adagp, Paris 2019
Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Dist. RMN-GP

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Portrait of Pablo Picasso
1936
Pastel on paper
57.5 x 45cm
Private collection, Yann Panier
Courtesy Galerie Brame and Lorenceau
© Adagp, Paris 2019
© The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)
Portrait of Dora Maar
1937
Musée National Picasso-Paris
Copyright RMN-Grand Palais, Mathieu Rabeau and Succession Picasso, 2018

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Guernica
May-June, 1937
Gelatin silver print
Musée National Picasso-Paris
Copyright RMN-Grand Palais, Mathieu Rabeau and Succession Picasso, 2018

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Picasso working on “Guernica”
1937
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy VEGAP / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia

Installation view of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing Maar’s painting The Conversation 1937
Photo: Tate (Andrew Dunkley)

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
The Conversation
1937
Oil on canvas
162 x 130cm
Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte, Madrid
© FABA © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019
Photo: Marc Domage

“I must dwell apart in the desert,” the artist and surrealist photographer Dora Maar once said. “I want to create an aura of mystery about my work. People must long to see it.

“I’m still too famous as Picasso’s mistress to be accepted as a painter.”

These words form part of a conversation recorded by Maar’s friend, the art writer James Lord, in his memoir “Picasso and Dora.” During the exchange, the French artist also explains how she rationalised the work of her later years, given that she rarely exhibited and was not in demand. …

With its deliberate focus on their art, the exhibition doesn’t address certain troubling questions about the pair’s unequal personal relationship. In her memoirs, Picasso’s later lover, Françoise Gilot, recounted the brutal bullying to which the artist subjected Maar. Picasso once described the time that Maar and a previous lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, came to blows in his studio as one of his “choicest memories.”

It’s a subject Maar didn’t shy away from in her art, painting herself alongside Walter in “The Conversation,” one of the works on show at the Tate Modern. Maar is depicted facing away while Walter looks directly at the viewer.

During the aforementioned exchange with James Lord, Maar told the writer that Picasso’s portraits of her were “lies.” But the struggle for recognition she went on to describe is more insightful – that she had to survive in the “desert” to be celebrated on her own terms.

Max Ramsay. “Dora Maar is no longer Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’,” on the CNN website 20th November 2019 [Online] Cited 23/11/2019

Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973)
Dora Maar seated
1938
Ink, gouache and oil paint on paper on canvas
Support: 689 x 625 mm
Frame: 925 x 685 x 120 mm
Tate
Purchased 1960

In late 1935 or early 1936, Maar met Pablo Picasso. They became lovers soon afterwards. She was at the height of her career, while he was emerging from what he described as ‘the worst time of my life’. He had not sculpted or painted for months.

Their relationship had a huge affect on both their careers. Maar documented the creation of Picasso’s most political work, Guernica 1937, encouraged his political awareness and educated him in photography. Specifically, Maar taught Picasso the cliché verre technique – a complex method combining photography and printmaking.

Picasso painted Maar in numerous portraits, including Weeping Woman 1937. However, Maar explained that she felt this wasn’t a portrait of her. Instead it was a metaphor for the tragedy of the Spanish people. Picasso also encouraged Maar to return to painting. The flattened features and bold outlines of the cubist-style portraits Maar made at this time suggest Picasso’s influence. By 1940 her passport listed her profession as ‘photographer-painter’.

Anonymous text from “Seven Things to Know: Dora Maar,” on the Tate website [Online] Cited 16/11/2019

Installation view of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing portraits of the artist by numerous artists, some of which you can see below

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Self-portrait with Fan
1930
Gelatin silver print

Emmanuel Sougez (French, 1889-1972)
Dora Maar
Paris, 1934
Gelatin silver print

Dora Maar considered the French commercial photographer Emmanuel Sougez (1889-1972) her mentor. Her first commission was a book on Mont-Saint-Michel written by art critic Germain Bazin. She collaborated with the stage-set designer Pierre Kéfer in 1931. From that experience they formed a business partnership, set up at first in his parents’ garden in Neuilly and then moving to their own studio at 9 rue Campagne-Première, lent by the Polish photographer Harry Ossip Meerson (1910-1991), younger brother of the cinema art director Lazare Meerson (1900-1938), who had worked with Kéber at Film Albatros studio in the mid-1920s. Harry Meerson also lent out his darkroom to the Hungarian photographer Brassai (Gyula Halász, 1899-1984), who became Dora Maar’s close friend. Her contact with Brassai brought her into the Surrealist circle.

The Kéfer-Dora Maar studio produced glamorous, innovative images for advertising and portraits, becoming part of the booming industry of commercial photography in glossy magazines. It was a fertile context for Dora Maar’s imagination. Her perspective on the modern women of the 1930s produced models oozing with elegant sensuality. Cool, natural, sometimes athletic, sometimes aristocratic, the Kéfer-Dora Maar female gave off a whiff of eroticise insouciance that emanated from Dora’s own disposition. This conceptualisation of contemporary beauty fed the appetite for luxury and leisure time activities, despite the Great Depression. It was a fantasy for some, a reality for others. During this period of working intensely with Pierre Kéfer, Dora had affairs with the filmmaker Louis Chavance (c. 1932-1933) and the erotically transgressive writer Georges Bataille (late 1933-1934). The Kéfer-Dora Maar studio closed in 1934.

Beth Gersh-Nesic. “Picasso’s Weeping Woman as Artist Instead of Muse: Dora Maar’s Retrospective at Centre Pompidou,” on the Bonjour Paris website July 24, 2019 [Online] Cited 23/11/2019

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Portrait of Dora Maar
1936
Gelatin silver print

Rogi André (née Rosa Klein) (French born Hungary, 1900-1970)
Dora Maar, Paris
1941
Gelatin silver print
6 1/2 x 4 1/2 in. (16.5 x 11.4cm)

Brassaï (French-Hungarian, 1899-1984)
Dora Maar dans son atelier rue de Savoie (Dora Maar in her workshop rue de Savoie)
1943
Gelatin silver print
© Adagp, Paris 2019 / Estate Brassaï – RMN-Grand Palais

Izis (Israel Bidermanas) (Lithuanian-Jewish, 1911-1980)
Dora Maar
1946
Gelatin silver print

Izis (Israel Bidermanas) (Lithuanian-Jewish, 1911-1980)

Israëlis Bidermanas (17 January 1911 in Marijampolė – 16 May 1980 in Paris), who worked under the name of Izis, was a Lithuanian-Jewish photographer who worked in France and is best known for his photographs of French circuses and of Paris.

Upon the liberation of France at the end of World War II, Izis had a series of portraits of maquisards (rural resistance fighters who operated mainly in southern France) published to considerable acclaim. He returned to Paris where he became friends with French poet Jacques Prévert and other artists. Izis became a major figure in the mid-century French movement of humanist photography – also exemplified by Brassaï, Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Sabine Weiss and Ronis – with “work that often displayed a wistfully poetic image of the city and its people.”

For his first book, Paris des rêves (Paris of Dreams), Izis asked writers and poets to contribute short texts to accompany his photographs, many of which showed Parisians and others apparently asleep or daydreaming. The book, which Izis designed, was a success. Izis joined Paris Match in 1950 and remained with it for twenty years, during which time he could choose his assignments.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Irving Penn (American, 1917-2009)
Dora Maar
France 1948
Gelatin silver print

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Still life
1941
Oil on canvas
© Adagp, Paris, 2019
Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / P. Migeat / Dist. RMN-GP

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Still Life with Jar and Cup
1945
Oil on canvas
45.5 x 50cm
Private Collection
© Adagp, Paris, 2019
Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / P. Migeat / Dist. RMN-GP

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Landscape in Lubéron
1950’s
Private collection of Nancy B. Negley
© Adagp © Brice Toul

Although the late works are not as significant contributions to the history of art as her Surrealist photomontages, they inform our knowledge of this Parisian artist’s accomplishments in general and beg the question: Was Dora Maar’s brilliant career cut short by the typical conflicts facing professional women in the 1930s, and even today? Or was she a victim of Picasso’s psychological abuse, which chipped away at her original confidence? Was she compromised to the point that she only wanted to please the man she loved? According to art historian John Richardson, Dora Maar sacrificed her gifts on the altar of her art god, her idol, Picasso. Based on the early Surrealist photographs we see in her retrospective, one can only wish she hadn’t taken up with Picasso, for it seems she might have achieved far more in her lifetime without him.

Beth Gersh-Nesic. “Picasso’s Weeping Woman as Artist Instead of Muse: Dora Maar’s Retrospective at Centre Pompidou,” on the Bonjour Paris website July 24, 2019 [Online] Cited 23/11/2019

Installation view of the exhibition Dora Maar at Tate Modern, 2019 showing Maar’s paintings and photograms from the 1950s-1980s (see below)

Abstract photogram

The 1940s brought a series of traumas. Maar’s father left Paris for Argentina, her mother and best friend Nusch Eluard both died suddenly, her relationship with Picasso ended, and friends went into exile. The difficulty of this time is reflected in some of her work from this period.

Maar was included in many group and solo exhibitions in the 1940s and 1950s. In the mid-1940s she began to spend more time in rural surroundings of Ménerbes in the south of France. Here she regained her confidence as a painter and developed her own style of abstract landscapes. Exhibited across Europe, this work received very positive reviews.

In the 1980s, Maar returned to photography. However, she was no longer interested in photographing life on the street. Instead, Maar was interested in what she could create in the darkroom and experimented with hundreds of photograms (camera-less photographs).

Dora Maar died on July 16, 1997, at 89 years old. Throughout her life she created a vast and varied range of work, much of which was only discovered after her death.

Anonymous text from “Seven Things to Know: Dora Maar,” on the Tate website [Online] Cited 16/11/2019

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Untitled
1980s
Silver gelatin print
9 x 6cm
Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris. Musée national d’art moderne Centre de création industrielle
© Adagp, Paris
Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / P. Migeat / Dist. RMN-GP

Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997)
Untitled
c. 1980
Silver gelatin print
9 x 6cm
Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris. Musée national d’art moderne Centre de création industrielle
© Adagp, Paris
Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / P. Migeat / Dist. RMN-GP

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
United Kingdom

Opening hours:
Daily 10.00 – 18.00

Tate Modern website

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European photographic research tour exhibition: ‘Lartigue: Life in Color’ at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest

Exhibition dates: 7th June – 1st September, 2019
Visited September 2019 posted November, 2019

Curators: Martine Ravache and Gabriella Csizek

Installation view of the exhibition Lartigue: Life in Color at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

A posting on this exhibition with some iPhone images I took in Budapest. I was lucky enough to see the exhibition the day before it closed.

What struck me most was Lartigue’s restrained use of colour. Mainly family portraits and landscapes, these photographs integrate a reduced colour palette with the line and form of the image. Subtle yet dynamic, the whimsical and poetic Ektachrome photographs were a revelation. You could say that there is seemingly nothing unusual about any of these photographs but just look – look at the light that radiates across Florette in Venice, the donkey and the washing, the green umbrella and tree laden with snow or the boys looking around to stare at the camera – and there is, indeed, something uncanny in the everyday. Just to see those two birds flying towards you in The Appian Way, Rome, Italy, January 1960 and to raise your camera to capture them mid-flight perfectly framed between the trees – what a moment!

While the original transparencies have faded, digital technology and restoration allows us to see them in all their glory: sometimes low depth of field, but always with a strong visual structure, these photographs form a holistic feeling as a body of images, a portrait of life in colour. Lartigue’s sense of fun is also evident in many images. There is no sense of the ego of the photographer in any of these images… they are, just so. Considered, concise and in colour (which is unusual for this time period) they possess an inimitable joie de vivre. This posting also features Lartigue’s early Autochromes which were interesting but nowhere as important as his later Ektachromes.

With a careful eye for composition, colour, and geometry, Lartigue’s background (in which he saw everything with his painter’s eye) is clearly translated in the pictorial construction of these sublime photographs.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) was the best-known “amateur” in the history of photography, famously discovered by the art world and given an exhibition at MoMA in New York when he was in his late sixties. He began by recording the pastimes and customs of his wealthy Parisian milieu, indulging his fascination with sports and aviation, and throughout his long life he was never without his camera. His friendships extended to the superstars of French culture, but he also made thousands of photographs of his family, wives, and lovers. His work was irresistibly warm and engaging.

Although known for his black-and-white work, Lartigue loved colour film, experimenting with the Autochrome process in the teens and twenties and embracing Ektachrome in the late 1940s. His colour work, reproduced here for the first time, is astonishingly fresh: the French countryside, the women in his life, famous friends (Picasso, Fellini), and glimpses from his travels all come alive in this delightful book.

Text from the Amazon website

Installation views of the exhibition Lartigue: Life in Color at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'Around Pau' France, December 1912 (installation view)

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Around Pau (installation view)
France, December 1912
Autochrome
6 x 13cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'Mrs Folletête, Rico, me, Sim, Manik and Mummy' Rouzat, France, September 16, 1913 (installation view)

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Mrs Folletête, Rico, me, Sim, Manik and Mummy (installation view)
Rouzat, France, September 16, 1913
Automchrome, triggered
6 x 13cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'Simone Roussel driving the "two-wheeled bob"' Rouzat, France, September 1913 from the exhibition 'Lartigue: Life in Color' at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest, June - Sept, 2019

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Simone Roussel driving the “two-wheeled bob”
Rouzat, France, September 1913
Autochrome
6 x 13cm
© Ministère de la Culture France/Association des Amis de Jacques Henri Lartigue, France

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'M. Folletête and Henry Lartigue' La Baule, France, May 1915 (installation view)

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
M. Folletête and Henry Lartigue (installation view)
La Baule, France, May 1915
Autochrome
6 x 13cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'Bibi at the Château de la Garoupe' Cap d'Antibes, France, 1920 (installation view)

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Bibi at the Château de la Garoupe (installation view)
Cap d’Antibes, France, 1920
Autochrome
6 x 13cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'Bibi' Cap d'Antibes, France, May 1920 (installation view)

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Bibi (installation view)
Cap d’Antibes, France, May 1920
Autochrome
6 x 13cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'Bibi' Rouzat, France, 1920 (installation view)

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Bibi (installation view)
Rouzat, France, 1920
Autochrome
6 x 13cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'Bibi and Germaine Chalom' Cannes, France, 1927 (installation view)

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Bibi and Germaine Chalom (installation view)
Cannes, France, 1927
Autochrome
6 x 13cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'Bibi in l'île Saint-Honorat' Cannes, May 1927 from the exhibition 'Lartigue: Life in Color' at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest, June - Sept, 2019

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Bibi in l’île Saint-Honorat
Cannes, May 1927
Autochrome
6 x 13cm
© Ministère de la Culture France/ Association des Amis de Jacques Henri Lartigue, France

Lartigue’s autochromes comprise a colourful reunion with all our favourite characters. We recognise Lartigue’s older brother Zissou with his glider (1914), and his beloved cousin Simone in her (blue!) bobsled wearing a stylish green ensemble (1913). But the plane is no longer airborne. And Simone is keeping still not to ruin the picture, instead of crashing down a gravel road with her tongue out, like she would in sepia. Due to the long exposure time dictated by the autochrome, Lartigue’s relatives are stalled in their playful banter to accommodate the sluggishness of the early color process.

“Is this still Lartigue? Are we disfiguring an artist?” curator Martine Ravache asks in the accompanying exhibition catalogue Lartigue: Life in Color, recently published by Abrams. Apart from the occasional leaping dog or bobsled, the subject matter is often quaint, even sentimental. The colour prints display exactly the pictorial quality for which Lartigue’s black-and-white work had been deemed antithetical. This realisation, which is as fascinating as it is uncomfortable, is downplayed by presenting Lartigue as a painter at heart who proclaimed to “see everything with my painter’s eye.”

Yet the picturesque subject matter is not enough to undermine his status as the lovechild of modernity – on the contrary. From the pink pastel of Bibi’s dainty hands (1921) to the fiery red nails of Florette and her glossy magazine (1961), the prints testify to Lartigue’s eagerness to experiment with any new photographic process he could get his hands on. The colour work constitutes more than the diaristic musings of a man in love. Marcelle “Coco” Paolucci is conspicuous by her absence, a hiatus that speaks more to the stalled development of colour photography than disaffection for his second wife. Discouraged by the sluggishness of the autochrome process, Lartigue stopped photographing in colour in 1927. He did not start again until 1949, after two world wars and the development of Ektachrome film. …

Tracing the incremental disclosure of Lartigue’s albums since Szarkowski reveals the making of an artist through careful curation. And so the exhibition texts about Lartigue’s love for the seasons or his relationship with God sidestep the more uneasy subtext: the jerky trajectory of Lartigue’s colour photographs from the amateur album to the museum wall.

Hinde Haest is a photography curator based in Amsterdam.

Hinde Haest. “Lartigue: Life in Color,” on the Aperture website February 3rd, 2016 [Online] Cited 08/11/2019

Installation view of the exhibition Lartigue: Life in Color at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest showing original Ektachrome transparencies
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'Cycling race between Nice-La Turbie France, March 1954' (installation view)

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Cycling race between Nice-La Turbie (installation view)
France, March 1954
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'Florette' Venice, May 1954 from the exhibition 'Lartigue: Life in Color' at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest, June - Sept, 2019

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Florette, Venice, May 1954
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Havanna, Cuba, 1957
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Cádiz, Spain, 1957 (during his trip to Cuba) (installation view)
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Saint-Dalmas de Tende, France, 1958 (installation view)
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Manfredonia, Italy, February 1958 (installation view)
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Via del Mandrione, Rome, Italy 1958 (installation view)
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Ascoli Piceno, Italy 1958 (installation view)
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Ascoli Piceno, Italy 1958
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Vendeé, France 1958 (installation view)
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
San Sebastian, Spain, 1958 (installation view)
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

One of the surprise-oeuvres of photography is that of the French painter Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986), who was born 125 years ago. He became a world-renowned photographer at the age of 69, following his extremely successful solo exhibition showcased at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, immediately becoming unavoidable in the history of photography.

He was documenting his life from the age of 6, keeping an “optical notebook.” He is interested in everything, his curiosity knows no limits. He is mesmerised by the possibility of capturing the one-time, unreproducible experiences, situations, and the observed visual interrelations in his photographs. He is not only seized by the joy of seeing, or the creation of images, but also by using the technical device itself, the camera, and the vast repository of possibilities it offers.

His main subjects were the achievements of technical innovation, flying, car races, speed, social life, women, beauty, and traveling. He magically turned the small miracles of everyday life, the enchanting conjunctions of objects and lights into a common memory for all of us. He disregarded photographic conventions; he followed his heart when taking photographs, he enjoyed observation, photography, and life itself.

Lartigue is a photographer of the bright side of life, whose visual diary reveals a history of the 20th century filled with beauty and joyful moments.

His full photographic oeuvre consists of 120,000 negatives, glass plates, slides, moving pictures, and 126 photo albums with the accompanying texts.

The Life in Color exhibition showcases a selection of the colour images making up about one-third of the oeuvre, providing an overview of not only the most determining relationships he had, his journeys and his everyday life, but also his experimentation with the various techniques of colour photography.

Gabriella Csizek, curator

Text from the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center website [Online] Cited 09/11/2019

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
The Appian Way, Rome, Italy, January 1960 (installation view)
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'Florette' Piozzo, Italy, 1960 (installation view)

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Florette (installation view)
Piozzo, Italy, 1960
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Park Bagatelle, Paris, France, June 1960 (installation view)
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Étretat, France, June 1960 (installation view)
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Sylvana Empain, Juan-les-Pins
France, 1960
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Brittany, 1960
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm

Driven by his curiosity and his perpetual search for innovation, Lartigue adopts colour processes shortly after their commercialisation. The Kodachromes (24 x 36) and the Ektachromes (6 x 6) followed the autochromes of its beginnings (dated 1912), which delighted 20th century photographers, both amateurs and professionals. Colour therefore adds a new dimension to the speed and immediacy that are at the heart of Lartigue’s work. His painter’s eye finds in this practice, which allows him to take visual “notes” to rework afterwards, a formidable transcription of his pictorial research.

His predilection goes to the subjects of his immediate environment: his life within his family, his games at the castle of Rouzat, sports of all kinds. Fascinated by nature as a whole, and particularly by flowers, the artist continually fixes its changing nuances, both on canvas and on film. This obsession is also found in the repetition of the views from his window in Opio (Alpes-Maritimes), and in the many images of Florette, his wife for forty years.

Little by little, Lartigue opens himself to other subjects, applying himself to testify to the daily life of the privileged and the more popular classes. This coincided with a period of openness to the world: from 1955, Lartigue multiplied his travels, discovering new landscapes and confronting the unknown. Leaving the seaside resorts where he used to spend his holidays (Basque Country, French Riviera or Normandy), it is Italy, Venezuela, Mexico and Cuba which are photographed in turn in black and white and in colors by Jacques Henri Lartigue.

Extract from the press release from the Musée de l’Elysée

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Florette’s hands, Brie-le-Néflier
France, June 1961
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, February 1962 (installation view)
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'On board the Christoforo Colombo during the New York-Cannes trip' May 1962 (installation view)

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
On board the Christoforo Colombo during the New York-Cannes trip (installation view)
May 1962
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Opio, France, 1963 (installation view)
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'Florette' 1964 (installation view)

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Florette (installation view)
1964
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Parma, Italy 1965 (installation view)
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Bretagne, France, 1965 (installation view)
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986) 'Florette and Stéphanie' Opio, France, Spring 1964 (installation view)

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Florette and Stéphanie (installation view)
Opio, France, Spring 1964
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Florette, Megève, March 1965
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Brittany, 1965
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm

Jacques Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)
Brittany, 1970
Ektachrome
6 x 6cm

Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest
8 Nagymező Street, 1065 Budapest, Hungary
Phone: +36 1 413 1310

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday: 1pm – 6pm
Saturday – Sunday: 10am – 6pm
Closed Mondays

Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest website

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Exhibition: ‘Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art’ at Tate Modern, London

Exhibition dates: 2nd May – 14th October, 2018

Curators: Simon Baker, Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) and Shoair Mavlian, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern, with Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais, Curator for Photographs

Pierre Dubreuil (French, 1872-1944) 'Interpretation of Picasso, The Railway' 1911 from the exhibition 'Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art' at Tate Modern, London, May - Oct, 2018

Pierre Dubreuil (French, 1872-1944)
Interpretation Picasso, The Railway
1911
Gelatin silver print on paper
238 x 194mm
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre de Création Industrielle
Purchased, 1987

An interesting premise –

“a premise is an assumption that something is true. In logic, an argument requires a set of (at least) two declarative sentences (or “propositions”) known as the premises or premisses along with another declarative sentence (or “proposition”) known as the conclusion” (Wikipedia)

– that the stories (the declarative sentences) of abstract art and abstract photography are intertwined (the conclusion). The two premises and one conclusion forms the basic argumentative structure of the exhibition.

Unfortunately in this exhibition, the abstract art and abstract photographs (declarations), seem to add up to less than the sum of its parts (conclusion).

Why is this so?

The reason these two bedfellows sit so uncomfortably together is that they are of a completely different order, one to the other.

Take painting for example. There is that ultimate linkage between brain, eye and hand as the artist “reaches out” into the unknown, and conjures an abstract representation from his imagination. This has a quality beyond my recognition. The closest that photography gets to this intuition is the cameraless Photogram, as the artist paints with light, from his imagination, onto the paper surface, the physical presence of the print.

Conversely, we grapple with the dual nature of photography, its relation to reality, to the real, and its interpretation of that reality through a physical, mechanical process – light entering a camera (metal, glass, digital chips, plastic film) to be developed in chemicals or on the computer, stored as a physical piece of paper or in binary code – but then we LOOK and FEEL what else a photograph can be. What it is, and what else it can be.

Initially, to take a photograph is to recognise something physical in the world which can then be abstracted. Here is a tree, a Platonic ideal, now here is the bark of the tree, or cracks in dried mud, or Aaron Siskind’s Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation in which, in our imagination, the body is no longer human. This archaeology of photography is a learnt behaviour (from the world, from abstract paintings) where ones learns to turn over the truth to something else, a recognition of something else. Where one digs a clod of earth, inspects it, and then turns it over to see what else it can be.

We can look at something in the world just for what it is and take a photograph of it, but then we can look at the same object for what else it can be (for example, Man Ray’s image Dust Breeding (1920), which is actually dust motes on the top of Duchamp’s Large Glass). Photographers love these possibilities within the physicality of the medium, its processes and outcomes. Photographers love changing scale, perspective, distortion using their intuition to perhaps uncover spiritual truths. Here I are not talking about making doodles – whoopee look what I can make as a photographer! it’s important because I can do it and show it and I said it’s important because I am an artist! the problem with lots of contemporary photography – it is something entirely different. It is the integrity of the emotional and intellectual process.

Not a reaching out through the arm and hand, but an unearthing (a reaching in?) of the possibilities of what else photography can be (other than a recording process). As Stieglitz understood in his Equivalents, and so Minor White espoused through his art and in one of his three canons:

When the image mirrors the man
And the man mirrors the subject
Something might take over

And that revelation is something completely different from the revelation of abstract art.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Tate Modern for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Despite its roll call of stellar names, the show’s adrenaline soon slumps. A rhythm sets in, as each gallery offers perhaps a single non photographic work and dozens of medium format black and white abstracts arranged on an allied theme: extreme close ups, engineered structures, worms’ and birds’ eye views, moving light, the human body, urban fabric.

Individually each photograph is quite wonderful, but they echo each other so closely in their authors’ attraction to diagonal arrangements, rich surface textures, dramatic shadows, odd perspectives and close cropping, that the same ‘point’ is being made a dozen times with little to distinguish between the variants. …

By the present day, abstract photography has given in to its already Ouroboros-like tendencies, and swallowed itself whole, offering abstract photographs about the process of photography, and the action of light on its materials. This is a gesture I relished in Wolfgang Tillmans’s show in the same space this time last year, when it was broken up by a plethora of other ideas and perspectives on photography. Here it feels like another level of earnest self-absorption with a century-long backstory.”

Hettie Judah. “By halfway round I actually felt faint,” on the iNews website May 5th 2018 [Online] Cited 14/07/2018. No longer available online

For the first time, Tate Modern tells the intertwined stories of photography and abstract art. The birth of abstract art and the invention of photography were both defining moments in modern visual culture, but these two stories are often told separately.

Shape of Light is the first major exhibition to explore the relationship between the two, spanning the century from the 1910s to the present day. It brings to life the innovation and originality of photographers over this period, and shows how they responded and contributed to the development of abstraction.

Key photographs are brought together from pioneers including Man Ray and Alfred Stieglitz, major contemporary artists such as Barbara Kasten and Thomas Ruff, right up to exciting new work by Antony Cairns, Maya Rochat and Daisuke Yokota, made especially for the exhibition.

Shape of Light | First Look

Tate Curator, Simon Baker, meets Caroline von Courten from leading photography Magazine, Foam. Together they explore the exhibition Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art at Tate Modern.

Exhibition Review – Shape of Light: 100 years of Photography and Abstract Art at Tate Modern

Wyndham Lewis (British, 1882-1957) 'Workshop' c. 1914-1915 (installation view)

Wyndham Lewis (British, 1882-1957)
Workshop (installation view)
c. 1914-1915
Tate
Purchased 1974
© Wyndham Lewis and the estate of Mrs G A Wyndham Lewis by kind permission of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity)

Percy Wyndham Lewis (18 November 1882 – 7 March 1957) was a British writer, painter, and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited BLAST, the literary magazine of the Vorticists.

His novels include Tarr (1918) and The Human Age trilogy, composed of The Childermass (1928), Monstre Gai (1955) and Malign Fiesta (1955). A fourth volume, titled The Trial of Man, was unfinished at the time of his death. He also wrote two autobiographical volumes: Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) and Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career Up-to-Date (1950).

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) 'Abstraction Bowls, Twin Lakes, Connecticut' 1916 from the exhibition 'Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art' at Tate Modern, London, May - Oct, 2018

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Abstraction Bowls, Twin Lakes, Connecticut
1916
Silver gelatin print

Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966)
Vortograph
1917
Gelatin silver print on paper
283 x 214mm
Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum NY
© The Universal Order

Installation view of the exhibition Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art at Tate Modern, London showing László Moholy-Nagy’s K VII at centre
Photo: © Tate / Andrew Dunkley

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946)
K VII
1922
Oil paint and graphite on canvas
Frame: 1308 x 1512 x 80mm
Tate
Purchased 1961

The ‘K’ in the title of K VII stands for the German word Konstruktion (‘construction’), and the painting’s ordered, geometrical forms are typical of Moholy-Nagy’s technocratic Utopianism. The year after it was painted, he was appointed to teach the one year-preliminary course at the recently founded Bauhaus in Weimar. Moholy-Nagy’s appointment signalled a major shift in the school’s philosophy away from its earlier crafts ethos towards a closer alignment with the demands of modern industry, and a programme of simple design and unadorned functionalism.

Gallery label, April 2012

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Rayograph
1922
Gelatin silver print on paper
Private Collection
© Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

El Lissitzky (Russian, 1890-1941) 'Proun in Material (Proun 83)' 1924

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946)
Photogram
c. 1925
Gelatin silver print on paper
Photo: Jack Kirkland Collection, Nottingham

Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866-1944)
Swinging
1925
Oil paint on board
705 x 502mm
Tate

Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973)
Bird in Space (L’Oiseau dans l’espace)
1926
Gelatin silver print on paper
253 x 202mm
Bequest of Constantin Brancusi, 1957
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre de Création Industrielle

Installation view of the exhibition Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art at Tate Modern, London showing at centre, Constantin Brancusi’s bronze and stone sculpture Maiastra (1911)
Photo: © Tate / Andrew Dunkley

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) 'Triangles' 1928

Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893-1983)
Painting
1927
Tempera and oil paint on canvas
972 x 1302mm
Tate
© Succession Miro/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) 'Anatomies' 1930

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Radio Station Power
1929
Gelatin silver print on paper
Lent by Jack Kirkland Collection, Nottingham
© A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova Archive. DACS, RAO 2018

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946)
Xanti Schawinsky on the balcony of the Bauhaus
1929
Gelatin silver print on paper

Luo Bonian (Chinese, 1911-2002)
Untitled
1930s
Gelatin silver print on paper
Courtesy The Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing
© Luo Bonian

Marta Hoepffner (German, 1912-2000)
Homage to de Falla
1937
Gelatin silver print on paper
387 x 278mm
Stadtmuseum Hofheim am Taunus
© Estate Marta Hoepffner

Nathan Lerner (American, 1913-1997)
Light Tapestry
1939
Gelatin silver print on paper
401 x 504mm
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Gift of Mrs Kiyoko Lerner, 2014
Photo: Nathan Lerner/© ARS, NY and DACS, London

Luigi Veronesi (Italian, 1908-1998)
Construction
1938
Gelatin silver print on paper
286 x 388mm
Tate
Accepted under the Cultural Gifts Scheme by HM Government from Massimo Prelz Oltramonti and allocated to Tate 2015

Luigi Veronesi (Italian, 1908-1998)
Photo n.145
1940, printed 1970s
Gelatin silver print on paper
310 x 280mm
Tate
Accepted under the Cultural Gifts Scheme by HM Government from Massimo Prelz Oltramonti and allocated to Tate 2015

Luigi Veronesi (Italian, 1908-1998)
Photo n.152
1940, printed 1970s
Gelatin silver print on paper
320 x 298mm
Tate
Accepted under the Cultural Gifts Scheme by HM Government from Massimo Prelz Oltramonti and allocated to Tate 2015

A major new exhibition at Tate Modern will reveal the intertwined stories of photography and abstract art. Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art will be the first show of this scale to explore photography in relation to the development of abstraction, from the early experiments of the 1910s to the digital innovations of the 21st century. Featuring over 300 works by more than 100 artists, the exhibition will explore the history of abstract photography side-by-side with iconic paintings and sculptures.

Shape of Light will place moments of radical innovation in photography within the wider context of abstract art, such as Alvin Langdon Coburn’s pioneering ‘vortographs’ from 1917. This relationship between media will be explored through the juxtaposition of works by painters and photographers, such as cubist works by George Braque and Pierre Dubreuil or the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Otto Steinert’s ‘luminograms’. Abstractions from the human body associated with surrealism will include André Kertesz’s Distorsions, Imogen Cunningham’s Triangles and Bill Brandt’s Baie des Anges, Frances 1958, exhibited together with a major painting by Joan Miró. Elsewhere the focus will be on artists whose practice spans diverse media, such as László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray.

The exhibition will also acknowledge the impact of MoMA’s landmark photography exhibition of 1960, The Sense of Abstraction. Installation photographs of this pioneering show will be displayed with some of the works originally featured in the exhibition, including important works by Edward Weston, Aaron Siskind and a series by Man Ray that has not been exhibited since the MoMA show, 58 years ago.

The connections between breakthroughs in photography and new techniques in painting will be examined, with rooms devoted to Op Art and Kinetic Art from the 1960s, featuring striking paintings by Bridget Riley and installations of key photographic works from the era by artists including Floris Neussis and Gottfried Jaeger. Rooms will also be dedicated to the minimal and conceptual practices of the 1970s and 80s. The exhibition will culminate in a series of new works by contemporary artists, Tony Cairns, Maya Rochat and Daisuke Yokota, exploring photography and abstraction today.

Shape of Light is curated by Simon Baker, Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) and Shoair Mavlian, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern, with Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais, Curator for Photographs, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue from Tate Publishing and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.

Press release from Tate Modern

Otto Steinert (German, 1915-1978)
Composition of Forms
1949
Gelatin silver print on paper
290 x 227mm
Jack Kirkland Collection, Nottingham

Guy Bourdin (French, 1928-1991)
Untitled
1952
Gelatin silver print on paper
277 x 164mm
Purchased with funds provided by the Photography Acquisitions Committee 2015
© The Guy Bourdin Estate

Guy Bourdin (French, 1928-1991)
Untitled
1952
Gelatin silver print on paper
232 x 169mm
Purchased with funds provided by the Photography Acquisitions Committee 2015
© The Guy Bourdin Estate

Guy Bourdin (French, 1928-1991)
Untitled
c. 1950s
Gelatin silver print on paper
239 x 179mm
Purchased with funds provided by the Photography Acquisitions Committee 2015
© The Guy Bourdin Estate

Untitled c.1950s is a black and white photograph by the French photographer Guy Bourdin. The entirety of the frame is taken up by a close-up of peeling paint. The paint sections fragment the image into uneven geometric shapes, which are interrupted by a strip of the dark surface beneath that winds from the top to the bottom of the frame. There is little sense of scale or contextual detail, resulting in a near-abstract composition.

Bourdin is best known for his experimental colour fashion photography produced while working for French Vogue between 1955 and 1977. This photograph belongs to an earlier period of experimentation, before he began to use colour and work in fashion. Taken outside the studio, it shows Bourdin’s sensitivity to the natural world and his attempt to transform the everyday into abstract compositions, bridging the gap between surrealism and subjective photography. Bourdin’s early work was heavily influenced by surrealism, as well as by pioneers of photography as a fine art such as Edward Weston, Paul Strand and Bill Brandt. His surrealist aesthetic can be attributed to his close relationship with Man Ray, who wrote the foreword to the catalogue for Bourdin’s first solo exhibition of black and white photographs at Galerie 29, Paris, in 1952.

This and other early works in Tate’s collection (such as Untitled (Sotteville, Normandy) c. 1950s, Tate P81205, and Solange 1957, Tate P81216) are typical of Subjektive Fotografie (‘subjective photography’), a tendency in the medium in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Led by the German photographer and teacher Otto Steinert, who organised three exhibitions under the title Subjektive Fotografie in 1951, 1954 and 1958, the movement advocated artistic self-expression – in the form of the artist’s creative approach to composition, processing and developing – above factual representation. Subjektive Fotografie’s emphasis on, and encouragement of, individual perspectives invited both the photographer and the viewer to interpret and reflect on the world through images. Bourdin’s interest in this can be seen in his early use of texture and abstraction, evident in close-up studies of cracked paint peeling off an external wall or a piece of torn fabric. These still lives were often dark in subject matter and tone, highlighting Bourdin’s interest in surrealist compositions and the intersection between death and sexuality. The works made use of the photographer’s urban environment, with deep black and high contrast printing techniques employed to create a sombre mood.

This approach was also important for Bourdin’s early portraiture, which anticipated his subsequent work in fashion. The subject of his portraits – often Solange Gèze, to whom the artist was married from 1961 until her death in 1971 – is usually framed subtly, rarely appearing in the centre or as the main focus of the image. In these works the figure is secondary, showing how Bourdin let the natural or urban environment frame the subject and integrate the body into its immediate surroundings. Bourdin was meticulous about the creative process from start to finish, sketching out images on paper and then recreating them in the landscape, using the natural environment as a stage set for his work.

Shoair Mavlian
August 2014

Jackson Pollock (American, 1912-1956)
Number 23
1948
Enamel on gesso on paper
575 x 784mm
Tate: Presented by the Friends of the Tate Gallery (purchased out of funds provided by Mr and Mrs H.J. Heinz II and H.J. Heinz Co. Ltd) 1960
© ARS, NY and DACS, London 2018

Installation view of the exhibition Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art at Tate Modern, London showing at left Jackson Pollock’s Number 23 (1948, above)
Photo: © Tate / Sepharina Neville

Installation view of the exhibition Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art at Tate Modern, London showing at top left, Nathan Lerner’s Light Tapestry; and at centre right, Otto Steinert’s Luminogram II (1952, below)
Photo: © Tate / Sepharina Neville

Otto Steinert (German, 1915-1978)
Luminogram II
1952
Gelatin silver print on paper
302 x 401mm
Jack Kirkland Collection Nottingham
© Estate Otto Steinert, Museum Folkwang, Essen

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Mud Cracks
1955
Silver gelatin print
203 x 254mm
Lent by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of Christian Keesee Collection 2013
© The Brett Weston Archive/CORBIS

Peter Keetman (German, 1916-2005)
Steel Pipes, Maximilian Smelter
1958
Gelatin silver print on paper
508 x 427mm
F.C. Gundlach Foundation

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Unconcerned Photograph
1959
Museum of Modern Art, New York
© Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018

Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé (French, 1926-2022)
Jazzmen
1961
Printed papers on canvas
2170 x 1770mm
Presented by the Friends of the Tate Gallery 2000
© Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé

The Jazzmen is a section of what Jacques Villeglé termed affiches lacérées, posters torn down from the walls of Paris. These particular ones were taken on 10 December 1961. Following his established practice, Villeglé removed the section from a billboard and, having mounted it on canvas, presented it as a work of art. In ‘Des Réalités collectives’ of 1958 (‘Collective Realities’, reprinted in 1960: Les Nouveaux Réalistes, pp. 259-60) he acknowledged that he occasionally tore the surface of the posters himself, although he subsequently restricted interventions to repairs during the mounting process. The large blue and green advertisements for Radinola (at the top right and lower left) provide the main visible surface for The Jazzmen. These establish a compositional unity for the accumulated layers. Overlaid are fragmentary music posters and fly-posters, some dated to September 1961, including the images of the red guitarists that lend the work its title. The artist’s records give the source as rue de Tolbiac, a thoroughfare in the 13th arrondissement in south-east Paris. Villeglé usually uses the street as his title, but has suggested (interview with the author, February 2000) that the title The Jazzmen may have been invented for the work’s inclusion in the exhibition L’Art du jazz (Musée Galliera, Paris 1967).

Villeglé worked together with Raymond Hains (b. 1926) in presenting torn posters as works of art. They collaborated on such works as Ach Alma Manetro, 1949 (Musée nationale d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris), in which typography dominates the composition. They first showed their affiches lacérées in May 1957 at the Galerie Colette Allendy, Paris, in a joint exhibition named Loi du 29 juillet 1881 ou le lyrisme à la sauvette (The Law of 29 July 1881 or Lyricism through Salvage) in reference to the law forbidding fly-posting. Villeglé sees a social complexity in the developments in the style, typography and subject of the source posters. He also considers the processes of the overlaying and the pealing of the posters by passers-by to be a manifestation of a liberated art of the street. Both aspects are implicitly political. As Villeglé points out, anonymity differentiates the torn posters from the collages of the Cubists or of the German artist Kurt Schwitters. In ‘Des Réalités collectives’ Villeglé wrote: ‘To collages, which originate in the interplay of many possible attitudes, the affiches lacérées, as a spontaneous manifestation, oppose their immediate vivacity’. He saw the results as extending the conceptual basis of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, whereby an object selected by an artist is declared as art. However, this reduction of the artist’s traditional role brought an end to Villeglé’s collaboration with Hains, who held more orthodox views of creative invention.

In 1960 Villeglé, Hains and François Dufrêne (1930-1982), who also used torn posters, joined the Nouveaux Réalistes group gathered by the critic Pierre Restany (b.1930). Distinguished by the use of very disparate materials and techniques, the Nouveaux Réalistes – who also included Arman (b.1928), Yves Klein (1928-1962) and Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) – were united by what Villeglé has called their ‘distance from the act of painting’ as characterised by the dominant abstraction of the period (interview February 2000). In this way, Klein’s monochrome paintings (see Tate T01513) and Villeglé’s affiches lacérées (lacerated posters) conform to the group’s joint declaration of 27 October 1960: ‘The Nouveaux Réalistes have become aware of their collective singularity. Nouveau Réalisme = new perceptual approaches to reality.’ The Jazzmen, of the following year, embodies Villeglé’s understanding of his ‘singularity’ as a conduit for anonymous public expression.

Matthew Gale
June 2000

Edward Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
Gilmore Drive-In Theater – 6201 W. Third St.
1967, printed 2013
Gelatin silver prints on paper
356 x 279mm
Courtesy Ed Ruscha and Gagosian Gallery
© Ed Ruscha

Installation view of the exhibition Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art at Tate Modern, London
Photo: © Tate / Andrew Dunkley

Installation view of the exhibition Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art at Tate Modern, London showing Gregorio Vardanega’s Circular Chromatic Spaces 1967. Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris
Photo: © Tate / Andrew Dunkley

John Divola (American, b. 1949) '74V11' 1974

Barbara Kasten (American, b. 1936)
Photogenic Painting, Untitled 74/13 (ID187)
1974
Salted paper print
558 x 762mm
Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and Bortolami Gallery, New York
© Barbara Kasten

James Welling (American, b. 1951)
Untitled
1986
C-print on paper
254 x 203mm
Jack Kirkland Collection, Nottingham
© James Welling. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London/Hong Kong and Maureen Paley, London

Installation view of the exhibition Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art at Tate Modern, London showing Sigmar Polke’s Untitled (Uranium Green) 1992. Hans Georg Näder © The Estate of Sigmar Polke / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn and DACS London, 2018
Photo: © Tate / Seraphina Neville

Sigmar Polke (German, 1941-1910) 'Untitled (Uranium Green)' 1992

Sigmar Polke (German, 1941-1910)
Untitled (Uranium Green) (detail)
1992
10 Photographs, C-print on paper
Image, each: 610 x 508mm
The Estate of Sigmar Polke / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2017
Photo: Adam Reich/The Estate of Sigmar Polke / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn and DACS London, 2018

Daisuke Yokota (Japanese, b. 1983)
Untitled
2014
from Abstracts series
© Daisuke Yokota
Courtesy of the artist and Jean-Kenta Gauthier Gallery

Process is at the core of Yokota’s photographs. For his black-and-white work, such as the series Linger or Site/Cloud, Yokota sifts through an archive of more than 10 years of photographs in his Tokyo apartment. When he finds something that speaks to him – a nude figure, a chair, a building, a grove of trees – he makes a digital image of it, develops it, and rephotographs the image up to 15 times, until it becomes increasingly degraded. He develops the film in ways that are intentionally “incorrect,” allowing light to leak in, or singeing the negatives, using boiling water, or acetic acid. The purported subject fades, and shadows, textures, spots and other sorts of visual noise emerge. For his recent colour work, trippy, sensual abstractions, the process is similar, except that it is cameraless; he doesn’t start with a preexisting image. “I wanted to focus on the emulsion, on the different textures, more than on a subject being photographed,” says Yokota.

IN THE STUDIO
Daisuke Yokota
By Jean Dykstra

November – December 2015. No longer available online

Antony Cairns (British, b. 1980) 'LDN5_051' 2017

Installation view of the exhibition Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art at Tate Modern, London showing the installation A Rock Is A River, 2018 by the artist Maya Rochat. Courtesy Lily Robert and VITRINE, London | Basel © Maya Rochat
Photo: © Tate / Sepharina Neville

Maya Rochat (German, b. 1985) 'A Rock is a River (META CARROTS)' 2017

Maya Rochat (German, b. 1985) 'A Rock is a River (META RIVER)' 2017

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
United Kingdom

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Exhibition: ‘Brassaï’ at Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona

Exhibition dates: 20th February – 13th May, 2018

Curator: Mr. Peter Galassi

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Vista per sota del Pont Royal cap al Pont de Solférino
View through the pont Royal toward the pont Solférino
c. 1933
(Nuit / Night 53)
40.1 x 51cm
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

For those who know how to look

Not everyone can see. It takes a great eye and a great mind, and the liberation of that mind, to be able to transform the mundane, the everyday, the vernacular – into art. Brassaï’s folklore, his mythology of life, suggests that the life of others (those living on the edge) is as valuable and essential to the formation of culture as any other part of existence.

Brassaï’s work comes alive at night and, as Alejandra Uribe Ríos observes, “The night was undoubtedly the great muse of his work, his inspiration.” While he got some of his friends to stage scenes for his book Paris by night – acting as prostitutes and customers hanging around in back alleys – it matters not one bit. The artist was embedded in this world and represents what he knows, what he has seen in his mind’s eye.

The density of his photographs is incredible – their atmosphere thick and heavy; revealing and beautiful. “In certain photographs, objects take on a particular light, a fascinating presence. Vision has fixed them “as they are in themselves” […]. It confers a density that is entirely foreign to their real existence. They are there, one might say, for the first time, but at the same time for the last.” The first and last, a circular compaction of time and space into the eternal present, objects as they are in themselves and will always be.

That fascinating presence can be felt even today, for that is what the time freeze of photography does: it “look backwards and forwards in the same instance.”

Brassaï saw something clearly, so that we might see it now. Look at the seemingly mundane space portrayed in Concierge’s Lodge, Paris (1933, below) from his book Paris de jour / Paris by Day. The photograph could be taken at night, but it is day! The small amount of sunlight falls on the tied-back curtain in the doorway; the crumpled mat lies outside the door; the two doors compete for our visual attention – one the solid presence that holds up the left hand side of the image, the other the vanishing point in the distance; and the eye is led down to this door by the pavement and the gutter with a band of water emphasising the form. The verticality of the worn and ancient stone work is emphasised by the modern metal box in front of it, leading the eye up to the Concierge sign only, mind you, for numbers 5 & 7. But then the mystery… what is going on above the ancient door at the rear – the sky, a ceiling, another wall lit by the last rays of the sun? Such a dense, complex image that requires an intimate knowledge of the mystery of place, in both the artist and the viewer.

Here we see Brassaï in Self-portrait, Boulevard Saint-Jacques, Paris 14ème, standing in the snow at night, heavy overcoat, hat, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, squinting through his camera to previsualise not just the photograph he is taking, but it’s final, physical embodiment, the print. In our world today of Insta-photos, millions and millions of photographs that mean basically nothing, and where anyone without training can pick up a camera and think of themselves a photographer, there is something to be said for taking the time to train and educate your eye and your mind. Only then might you reveal something about the world and, possibly, yourself as well.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

@mapfrefcultura #expo_brassai

Many thankx to Fundación MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“I was eager to penetrate this other world, this fringe world, the secret, sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts. Rightly or wrongly, I felt at the time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, its most alive, its most authentic, that in these colourful faces of its underworld there had been preserved from age to age, almost without alteration, the folklore of its most remote past.”

Brassaï, 1976

“In certain photographs, objects take on a particular light, a fascinating presence. Vision has fixed them “as they are in themselves” […]. It confers a density that is entirely foreign to their real existence. They are there, one might say, for the first time, but at the same time for the last.”

Brassaï, undated note

“To oblige the model to behave as if the photographer isn’t there really is to stage a comic performance. What’s natural is precisely not to dodge the photographer’s presence. The natural thing in that situation is for the model to pose honestly.”

Brassaï, undated note

“The night suggests, he does not teach. The night finds us and surprises us by its strangeness; it liberates in us the forces that, during the day, are dominated by reason.”

“Night does not show things, it suggests them. It disturbes and surprises us with its strangeness. It liberates forces within us which are dominated by our reason during the daytime.”

Brassaï

“The night was undoubtedly the great muse of his work, his inspiration. The train tracks, the lovers, the fog, the posters, the ballet and the cabarets. Everything is worthy of portraying for those who know how to look and that is undoubtedly one of Brassai’s merits: embodying the everyday, rescuing the magical, the lyrical, the mystery of common life, and doing it with elegance, converting the seemingly trivial into a artwork.”

Alejandra Uribe Ríos

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984) 'Porteria, París [Concierge's Lodge, Paris]' 1933 from the exhibition from the exhibition 'Brassaï' at Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona, Feb - May, 2018

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Porteria, París
Concierge’s Lodge, Paris
1933
(Paris de jour / Paris by Day 686)
29.3 x 22.2cm
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984) 'The Eiffel Tower seen through the Gate of the Trocadéro' 1930-1932

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
La Torre Eiffel vista a través del reixat del Trocadéro
La torre Eiffel vista a través de la reja del Trocadero
The Eiffel Tower seen through the Gate of the Trocadéro
1930-32
(Nuit / Night 1; variant of Paris de nuit / Paris by Night, plate 57)
30 x 23.6cm
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984) 'Extinguishing a Streetlight, rue Émile Richard' c. 1932

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Apagant un fanal, Rue Émile Richard
Apagando una farola, rue Émile Richard
Extinguishing a Streetlight, rue Émile Richard
c. 1932
(Nuit / Night 267)
22.9 x 28.1cm
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Avenue de l’Observatoire
1934
Gelatin silver print
23.4 x 30.1cm
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984) 'Streetwalker, near the place d’Italie' 1932

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Meuca, a prop de la Place d’Italie
Prostituta, cerca de la Place d’Italie
Streetwalker, near the place d’Italie
1932
(Plaisirs / Pleasure 333)
29.9 x 22.9cm
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Introduction

Fundación MAPFRE is launching its 2018 exhibition programme in Barcelona with the exhibition Brassaï, a comprehensive survey of the career of this celebrated Hungarian-born French photographer whose work helped to define the spirit of Paris in the 1930s. Brassaï was one of the most important of the group of European and American photographers whose work in the inter-war years greatly enriched photography’s potential as a form of artistic expression.

The artist began to take photographs in 1929 or 1930, maintaining an intense level of activity throughout the 1930s. Brassaï’s principal subject was Paris, where he settled in 1924, intending to become a painter. Around the end of World War I the artistic centre of the city had shifted from Montmartre to Montparnasse where most of the artists, constituting a major international community, lived like a large family. Brassï was fascinated by the French capital and later said that he started to take photographs in order to express his passion for the city at night. Soon, however, he also began to take portraits, nudes, still life, images of everyday life and depictions of picturesque corners of the city and moments captured during the day.

Brassaï’s confidence in the power of blunt, straightforward photography to transform what it describes, as well as his talent for extracting from ordinary life iconic images of lasting force, won him an important place among the pioneers of modern photography.

This exhibition offers a survey of the artist’s career through more than 200 works (vintage photographs, a number of drawings, a sculpture and documentary material) grouped into twelve thematic sections, of which the two devoted to Paris in the 1930s are the most important. Produced by Fundación MAPFRE and curated by Peter Galassi, chief curator of the Department of Photography at the MoMA, New York, from 1991 to 2011, this is the first retrospective exhibition on Brassaï to be organised since 2000 (Centre Pompidou) and the first to be held in Spain since 1993.

The exhibition benefits from the exceptional loan of the Estate Brassaï Succession (Paris) and other loans from some of the most important institutions and private collections in Europe and the United States, including: The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou (París), The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, David Dechman and Michel Mercure, ISelf Collection (London) and Nicholas and Susan Pritzker.

The Photographer – Brassaï (Gyulá Halász, 1899-1984)

Brassaï (the pseudonym of Gyulá Halász) was born in 1899 in Brassó, Transylvania (present-day Braşov in Rumania), from where he subsequently took his name for signing his photographs (Brassaï means “from Brassó”).

After studying art in Budapest and Berlin, he moved to Paris and very soon began to earn occasional money and establish a reputation by selling articles and caricatures to German and Hungarian magazines. Photographs were rapidly replacing traditional magazine illustrations and Brassaï also functioned as a one-man photo-agency. Eventually he started making photographs himself, abandoning painting and sculpting, disciplines for which he nevertheless retained great interest and to which he returned during his career. Around 1900, an aesthetic movement had justified its claim that photography was as a fine art by imitating the appearance of the traditional arts. It was not until the 1920s and 1930s that a new generation rejected that approach and began exploring the artistic potential of plain, ordinary photographs. When the tradition that they launched began to achieve widespread recognition in the 1970s, Brassaï would be recognised as one of its leading figures.

During the German occupation of Paris, Brassaï was obliged to stop taking photographs and he thus returned to drawing and writing. In 1949 he obtained French nationality. After the war he once again devoted part of his time to photography and traveled regularly to undertake commissions for the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar. He died in Beaulieu-sur-Mer (France) in 1984 without ever returning to his native Brassó.

The sections of the exhibition

Paris by Night

Paris by Night was in fact the result of a commission which the publisher Charles Peignot gave to the young and still unknown Brassaï. The book, of which a copy is presented in the exhibition, was published in December 1932 and was extremely successful thanks in part to its modern design, pages without margins and richly toned photogravures. Brassaï continued to explore nocturnal Paris throughout the 1930s, developing a personal vision that is embodied in numerous prints in the exhibition.

They evoke the city’s dynamic, vibrant mood: the close-up image of a gargoyle on Notre Dame Cathedral rather than a conventional view of that building, or the Pont Royal seen from the water rather than from above. These are almost always silent images in which time seems to stand still.

Pleasures

When Brassaï reorganised his archive just after World War II, gathered under the rubric Plaisirs he included his pictures of small-time criminals and prostitutes and other figures of Parisian low life together with images of Parisian entertainments, including cheap dance halls to local street fairs to the annual entertainments designed to flout bourgeois conventions. Brassaï obtained permission to work backstage at the famous Folies Bergère, which allowed him to observe everything that was happening from a high viewpoint. His images of Parisian low life transpose to the vivid new medium of photography a vital mythology that had been elaborated in literature and the traditional visual arts.

No one photographed Paris by night as skilfully as Brassaï but he also built up a considerable collection of images of the city by day. Its famous monuments, picturesque corners and details of everyday life are the subject of many of these photographs. Some of his images of the early 1930s reveal his interest in daring geometrical forms and abrupt truncation, for example his famous images of the city’s cobblestones. But even his boldest graphic experiments reflect his abiding fascination with the continuities of an enduring human civilisation.

Paris by day

Nobody photographed Paris at night as accurately as Brassaï, but also accumulated a considerable collection of images of the city in daylight. Monuments, picturesque corners or details of everyday life play a large part in these scenes.

Some of his photographs from the thirties also reflect his interest in geometric styles or abrupt cuts, as shown by the famous cobblestone images of city streets. But even these bolder graphic experiments reflect, like the rest of his images of the city, his permanent fascination with what for him was presented as a remote and inexhaustible tradition, in constant development.

Graffiti

The notion of graffiti as a powerful art form first emerged in the 20th century. Like African tribal objects, children’s art or that of the mentally ill, graffiti was considered more expressive and vital than the refined forms of traditional western art.

Brassaï was in fact one of the first to focus on this subject matter. He was an inveterate hoarder who throughout his life collected all types of cast-off objects and from almost the moment he began to take photographs he used the medium to record the graffiti he saw on the walls of Paris. He preferred examples of graffiti that had been incised or scratched to drawn or painted ones, as well as those in which the irregularity of the wall itself played an important role in aesthetic terms. He took hundreds of images of this type of which only a small selection is on display here.

Minotaure

Between the time of his arrival in Paris in early 1924 and his first steps in photography taken six years later, Brassaï built up a large circle of friends within the international community of artists and writers in Montparnasse. They included Les deux aveugles [The two blind men], as the art critics Maurice Raynal and the Greek-born E. Tériade referred to themselves. In December 1932, the same month that Paris de nuit was published, Tériade invited Brassaï to photograph Picasso and his studios to illustrate the first issue of Minotaure, the deluxe art magazine that would be published in 1933 by the Swiss publisher Albert Skira. Copies of various different issues are on display in this section. This collaboration marked the starting point of Brassaï’s friendship with Picasso, one of the most important of his entire life. Over the following years Brassaï would play an important role in the life of the magazine, particularly with the projects for which he collaborated with Salvador Dalí and as an illustrator to texts by André Breton, although in some cases as an artist in his own right. The first number of the magazine included a series of nudes by Brassaï and his growing graffiti series, while number 7 devoted several pages to Brassaï’s nocturnal visions. All these evoke the artist’s modernity and his relationship with the most important circles of the Parisian avant-garde.

Personages / Characters

In 1949 in his prologue to Camera in Paris, a monograph on contemporary photographers, Brassaï paraphrased Baudelaire in The Painter of modern Life and established a line of continuity between the art of the photographer and that of some of the great artists of the past such as Rembrandt, Goya and Toulouse-Lautrec. In this sense he explained how, like them, photography could elevate ordinary subjects to the level of the universal. The people depicted in this gallery reflect that idea as not only do we see a worker at Les Halles market, a transvestite or a penitent in Seville, but through the dignity given to them by the image all of them exceed their individuality and come to represent a collective.

Places and things

One of Brassaï’s earliest projects, which was never produced, was a book of photographs of cacti. Many years later, in 1957, he made a short film on animals. Most of his photographs of objects or places, however, focus on human creations, reflecting his boundless curiosity about the people that made them, used them or lived in them.

During his trips Brassaï took numerous photographs of which a small selection are on display here: a view of Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia from a high viewpoint, a painted wall in Sacromonte, Granada, and a shop window in New Orleans. In some of these images, such as Vineyard, Château Mouton-Rothschild (June 1953), the viewpoint jumps sharply from the foreground to the background, splitting the image in half along its horizontal axis – a pictorial device invented by Brassaï.

Society

During the mid-1930s and just after World War II, Brassaï photographed at more than two dozen gatherings of Parisian high society – costume balls, fancy soirées, and other events both at private homes and such elegant venues as the Ritz – as well as the famous Nuit de Longchamp (the race course just outside of Paris) every summer from 1936 to 1939. At these events he had much less opportunity to intervene in the action than in Parisian dance halls and bars, but he nonetheless was able to create lasting images of a distinct social reality. Perhaps the most extraordinary of them is his photograph of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Art Nouveau interior of the swank restaurant Maxim’s (completed just a few years before the Casa Garriga Nogués). Although that image has been famous since it was made in 1949, Brassaï’s series on Parisian high society is poorly known, and several of the photographs are presented for the first time in this exhibition.

Body of a woman

During the occupation of Paris (1940-1944), Brassaï declined to work for the Germans and so was unable to photograph openly. His only income seems to have come from a clandestine commission from Picasso to photograph the master’s sculptures. Partly at Picasso’s urging, Brassaï returned to drawing. Most of the drawings that he made in 1943-1945, like most of the drawings that survive from his time as an art student in Berlin in 1921-1922, are female nudes. The same is the case with many of the sculptures that he started to produce after the war, often made from stones worn by the effect of water.

It would be foolish to attempt to disguise the intensity of Brassaï’s male gaze behind the curtain of a purely aesthetic pursuit of “form.” What is distinctive and powerful in his images of the female body is their unembarrassed carnal urgency.

Portraits: artists, writers, friends

Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Henry Miller (who gave Brassaï the sobriquet “The eye of Paris”), Pierre Reverdy, Jacques Prévert, Henri Matisse and Léon-Paul Fargue are just a few of the subjects of the portraits on display in this section of the exhibition.

Most of Brassaï’s portraits are of people that he knew and perhaps as a result of that closeness they convey a powerful spirit of frankness, unencumbered by posturing. It is also true; however, that Brassaï regularly achieved that spirit even when he did not know the subject.

Sleep

Broadly speaking, the hallmark of advance European photography in the 1920s and 1930s was a new sense of mobility and spontaneity. But spontaneity was alien to Brassaï’s sensibility, which instead sought clarity and stability. Instead of the popular, hand-held camera, a 35mm Leica, Brassaï chose a camera that used glass plates and often stood on a tripod. As if to declare his independence from the aesthetic of mobility, he chose sleeping in public as a recurrent motif.

The street

Brassaï’s work for Harper’s Bazaar led him to travel in France and in numerous other places, from Spain to Sweden, the United States and Brazil. While the roots of his talent lay in Paris he thus produced an extensive body of photographs taken in places that were unfamiliar to him. The exhibition includes a number of these works, three of them depicting Spain.

Press release from Fundación MAPFRE

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Chez Suzy
1931-1932
(Plaisirs / Pleasure 352)
30 x 23.8cm
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984) 'Nude in the Bathtub' 1938

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Nu a la banyera
Desnudo en la bañera
Nude in the Bathtub
1938
(Nu / Naked 199)
23.5 x 17.3cm
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984) 'Four Seasons Ball, rue de Lappe' c. 1932

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Bal des Quatre Saisons, rue de Lappe
Four Seasons Ball, rue de Lappe
c. 1932
(Plaisirs / Pleasures 2)
49.8 x 40.4 cm
Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris © Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984) 'At Magic City' c. 1932

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Al Magic City
En Magic City
At Magic City
c. 1932
(Plaisirs / Pleasures 439)
23.2 x 16.6cm
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984) 'Lovers at the Gare Saint-Lazare' 1937

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Amants a l’estació de Saint-Lazare
Amantes en la Gare Saint-Lazare
Lovers at the Gare Saint-Lazare
c. 1937
(Plaisirs / Pleasures 143)
23.6 x 17.3cm
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984) 'Haute Couture Soirée' 1935

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Vetllada d’alta costura
Velada de alta costura
Haute Couture Soirée
1935
(Soirées 85 (image reversed))
17.6 x 21.1cm
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984) 'Lobster Seller, Seville' 1951

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Venedor de marisc, Sevilla
Vendedor de marisco, Sevilla
Lobster Seller, Seville
1951
(Étranger / Foreign 401)
49.3 x 37cm
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
New Orleans
1957
(Amérique / America 451)
35.9 x 29.4cm
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Montmartre
1930-1931
[Paris de jour / Paris by day 472.C]
29.8 x 39.6 cm
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Jean Genet, Paris
1948
(Arts 787.E)
39.7 x 30.2cm
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984) 'Picasso Holding One Of The Sculptures' 1939

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Picasso Tenant Une De Les Sculptures
Picasso Holding One Of The Sculptures
1939
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Portrait of Picasso in His Studio at 23 rue de La Boëtie, Paris
1932
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

23 rue de La Boëtie, Paris

Brassaï (Gyulá Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Self-portrait, Boulevard Saint-Jacques, Paris 14ème
c. 1931-1932
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris

Fundación MAPFRE – Instituto de Cultura
Casa Garriga i Nogués exhibition space
Calle Diputació, 250
Barcelona

Opening hours:
Mondays closed
Tuesday to Sundays (and holidays): 11 am – 7 pm

Fundación MAPFRE website

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Exhibition dates: 19th October, 2021 – 3rd April, 2022

The Eye of Paris

Night Walks

Portraying the Intellectual Circles

On the Walls of Paris

Brassaï / Picasso. A Friendship

Exhibition dates: 3rd June – 19th September, 2021

The power of imagination

Interview des commissaires de l’exposition Eugène Atget – Voir Paris

Biography

August 2020

Those daring young men in their war machines

Farman MF.11 Shorthorn bomber

Farman MF 11, photo reconnaissance

Chasseur

Chasseurs Alpins

Bandes molletières

Puttees

Kepi

Kepi, French Air Service, Kiffin Rockwell, Lafayette Escadrille

August 2020

Atget’s shadow

Exhibition dates: 13th September – 4th December 2019Visited September 2019 posted July 2020

Digital walk through of the exhibition Brassaï at Foam, Amsterdam in September 2019

Paris de nuit / Paris at night

Portraits – artists, writers and friends

Graffiti

Minotaure

Personages

Sleep

Visited October 2019 posted May 2020

Exhibition dates: 20th November 2019 – 15th March 2020

Izis (Israel Bidermanas) (Lithuanian-Jewish, 1911-1980)

Exhibition dates: 7th June – 1st September, 2019Visited September 2019 posted November, 2019

Exhibition dates: 2nd May – 14th October, 2018

Shape of Light | First Look

Exhibition Review – Shape of Light: 100 years of Photography and Abstract Art at Tate Modern

Exhibition dates: 20th February – 13th May, 2018

For those who know how to look

Introduction

The Photographer – Brassaï (Gyulá Halász, 1899-1984)

The sections of the exhibition

Paris by Night

Pleasures

Paris by day

Graffiti

Minotaure

Personages / Characters

Places and things

Society

Body of a woman

Portraits: artists, writers, friends

Sleep

The street

Exhibition dates: 13th September – 4th December 2019
Visited September 2019 posted July 2020

Exhibition dates: 7th June – 1st September, 2019
Visited September 2019 posted November, 2019