PARIS.- Mennour presents for the first time a dialogue between the photographs of Eugène Atget (1857-1927) and the paintings of Eugène Carrière (1849-1906), two contemporary artists in the Paris of the 19th century which witnessed the emergence of a new modernity.

The invention a photography at the beginning of the 19th century profoundly transformed the history of painting. Since it was possible to record realist scenes with the help of a camera obscura, how were the painters, in their mimetic relation to nature, to adapt and find new avenues? Rather than compete with this new technique, the most audacious among them tried to differentiate themselves from the fixed and “objective” image of photography by venturing onto new terrains, more expressive and impressionist. As for photography, it constantly worked at freeing itself from the technique until it became an art practice in its own right. While photographers were fighting the kinetic “fuzziness” of the camera, painters were trying, on the opposite, to reproduce it in the painting, claiming that models, even fixed, are always moving as long as they are alive. It is in that ambivalence that Atget and Carrière’s respective works are to be found, and posterity eventually recognised both artists as precursors.

Atget and Carrière probably never met, though they were contemporaries and both lived in the same neighbourhood. While Atget was walking the streets of Paris to document all its shop windows, carriage entrances that give a glimpse of the inner courtyards or the streets of a Paris about to dramatically change, Carrière chose the solitude of his Parisian apartment in which the hustle and bustle of everyday life and the familiarity of his recurrent models were sources of inspiration. Carrière never took photographs, however, his paintings in monochrome tones are reminiscent of those of the prints on albumin-coated paper made by Atget. That said, both artists worked systematically and went back on the same subjects, time and again. For Atget, it was the streets, details in the architecture, flowers, and rarely human figures. Photographs whose framing became more and more defined, more and more constructed, despite the modest ambition to produce “documents for artists”, which he displayed on his studio sign. As for Carrière, he favoured his wife and children, his loved ones caught in their daily activities, doing again and again the same portraits of women, often his wife, of maternities and landscapes. Atget like Carrière searching in the inframince of a new detail, for the endless desire to start all over again.

— Christian Alandete, curator of the exhibition

Born in 1857 in Libourne (FR), EUGÈNE ATGET died in Paris in 1927.

Eugène Atget is famous for his corpus of over 10,000 photographs of old Paris, produced over more than thirty years at the turn of the 20th century. At the age of thirty, he began photography by publishing self-taught photographic documents for artists, with plates of plants and landscapes. Around 1898 —at a time when the Commission du Vieux Paris was being set up—Eugène Atget began systematically photographing the old districts of Paris with his 18 x 24 view camera, as they were disappearing along with the small trades of Paris as the capital modernized. In 1901, Atget also took close-ups of decorative architectural elements (wrought-iron details on facades, doors, staircases, etc.).

In 1910, he envisioned a general sense and organization of his work, which he grouped into series and sub-series, laid out in albums to present his photographs to his clients (L’Art dans le vieux Paris, Intérieurs parisiens, La Voiture à Paris, Métiers, boutiques et étalages de Paris, Enseignes et vieilles boutiques de Paris, /oniers, Fortifications). When the Great War broke out in 1914, he virtually ceased all photographic activity to classify his work, which he offered for sale in 1920 to the French Historic Monuments Administration. For almost two decades, Atget sold his photographs to heritage institutions, notably the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris.

Invaluable in both documentary and artistic terms, Eugène Atget’s work attracted the attention of the Surrealists, particularly young photographers such as Berenice Abbott and Man Ray. The latter anonymously published three photographs by Atget in La Révolution surréaliste in 1926, a year before his death in 1927. Fascinated by his work, Abbott, together with gallery owner Julien Levy, bought Atget’s studio collection and promoted it until it entered the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1968.

In 2007, the Bibliothèque nationale de France devoted a major retrospective to Atget, and in 2012, the Museum of Modern Art organized the exhibition “Eugène Atget: Documents pour artistes”. More recently, in Paris, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson celebrated his work in 2021 with the exhibition “Voir Paris : Eugène Atget”. Today, his photographs are held in some of the world’s greatest museum collections.

EUGÈNE CARRIÈRE was born on the 16th of January 1849 in Gournay-sur-Marne and died in Paris on the 27th of March 1906.

He grew up in Strasburg, where he was trained in lithography, and studied at the École des Beaux- Arts de Paris under Cabanel. In 1878, he married Sophie Desmouceaux, with whom he would have seven children. The members of his family would be frequent models for his paintings. He exhibited regularly at the Salon des Artistes Français from 1878 to 1890, then at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

He was forever working outside of the stylistic categories of his time, and never joined any particular movement.

This unclassifiable painter, engraver, and drawer—the contemporary of Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Paul Gauguin, among others—quickly surrounded himself with the most influential figures of the artistic and literary world of his time, including Roger Marx, Jean Dolent, Alphonse Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt, Gabriel Séailles, and Paul Verlaine. His friendship with Auguste Rodin left a mark on his work, which drew its inspiration from tangible reality in a way similar to Rodin’s. The journalist and art critic Gustave Geffroy wrote in 1906, ‘For him, as for his masters, painting, which is surface work, gives the feeling of volume and weight. [...] Each one of Carrière’s portraits houses the solid and mechanical beauty of a skeleton.’

A precursor to Modernism, Carrière founded the Académie Carrière in 1890 in the Rue de Rennes in Paris. Among his students were those who would become known as the Fauvists—André Derain, Francis Jourdain, and Henri Matisse. Pablo Picasso, on his arrival in the city in 1901, also studied under Carrière, whose quasi- monochrome palette is a recognised influence on Picasso’s pink and blue periods.

Throughout his life, Carrière demonstrated a mastery of chiaroscuro. This led him to privilege light over colour, and to create complex and mysterious plays of transparency and depth. Like furtive, evanescent apparitions ungraspable by the brush, his figures emerge as if from a landscape, from a background, from another spacetime.