BARCELONA.- Philippe Halsman (Riga, Latvia, 1906 – New York, USA, 1979) experimented with photography throughout his career. He always insisted that there was much unexplored creative potential with regard to the image, summing up this opinion by quoting Sergei Diaghilev’s reply when Jean Cocteau asked him what he needed to do to in order work with him: “Astonish me!”. With this retort in mind, Halsman forged a career that spanned more than four decades, firstly in Paris and later in the United States, leaving dozens of iconic images in the popular imagination. The exhibition that
”la Caixa” Foundation now presents in cooperation with the Musée de l’Elysée of Lausanne is the most complete retrospective ever devoted to the American photographer, featuring not only some of his best-known portraits, but also many little-known images. Particularly interesting among the 300 documents that form Astonish Me! are the large group of pieces that have never been shown before —contact sheets, preliminary proofs, original photomontages and so on— that now see the light thanks to the cooperation of the artist’s family with this exhibition project.
As part of its cultural programmes, ”la Caixa” Foundation focuses particularly on the most contemporary art, work created in the 20th and 21st centuries. In exhibitions devoted to the cinema and photography, ”la Caixa” Foundation seeks to illustrate the influence that images exercise on contemporary sensibilities and to highlight the role that the great 20th-century visual artists play in defining our vision of the world. To this end, the institution has organised several anthological exhibitions devoted to such great names in photography as Henri Lartigue, Eugène Atget, Robert Doisneau, William Klein, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Willy Ronis, and filmmakers like Georges Méliès, Charles Chaplin and Federico Fellini.
On this occasion, ”la Caixa” Foundation presents the first major retrospective to be devoted in our country to Philippe Halsman (Riga, Latvia, 1906 – New York, USA, 1979), undoubtedly one of the great photographers of the last century.
Astonish Me! was organised by ”la Caixa” Foundation and produced by the Museé de l’Elysée of Lausanne in cooperation with the Philippe Halsman Archive of New York. Before reaching CaixaForum Barcelona, the show was presented at the Musée de l’Elysée, Jeu de Paume (Paris) and the Kunsthal (Rotterdam), and it will later travel to CaixaForum Madrid.
Philippe Halsman. Astonish Me! features some of the most outstanding pieces from the family collection in what is the most complete retrospective to be devoted to Halsman’s work to date, combining some of his most iconic images with other previously unknown works.
Through more than 300 photographs, the show suggests an in-depth journey through Halsman’s work and the formats that he used —portraits, reports, fashion photography, nudes— to reconstruct the photographer’s practice, from his beginnings in Paris to his time in New York. Many of these pieces —contact sheets, annotated contact prints, preliminary proofs, original photomontages and mock-ups— have never been shown before, and this exhibition truly opens a window onto his creative processes, illustrating his vision and concept of photography as an expressive medium that had yet to be fully explored.
The exhibition is divided into four parts: the introductory section is devoted to the years that Halsman spent in Paris, as his early work already presaged the interests and themes that he would pursue throughout his career. The other three sections are all devoted to the American period, each focusing on a different characteristic feature in Halsman’s work: he famous portraits of celebrities, especially those of Marilyn Monroe; his interest in mises en scène, including his collaborations with famous personalities, and, particularly, his renowned jumpology; and, finally, an impressive repertoire of “photographic ideas” that he produced in cooperation with Salvador Dalí over the course of more than three decades, a facet illustrated particularly by the book Dalí’s Mustache.
The exhibition is complemented by a publication, produced by ”la Caixa” Foundation and La Fàbrica, which takes an in-depth look at the main themes highlighted in the show itself: the period that Halsman devoted to learning his art in Paris in the 1930s; his portraits, his mises en scène and his fruitful friendship with Salvador Dalí. The publication includes articles by Marc Aufraise, PhD in the History of Photography and an expert on surreal photography in Europe and on the Halsman family itself.
As usual, ”la Caixa” Foundation organises a programme of activities for all audiences around the show. The parallel activities for Astonish Me! include a lecture by the curator Anne Lacoste and the artist’s daughter, Irene Halsman, as well as tours especially designed for senior citizens, families and schools groups.
