{"id":280694,"date":"2026-02-12T16:04:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T16:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/280694\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T16:04:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T16:04:13","slug":"eugene-atget-at-the-icp-an-incomplete-picture-of-a-photography-master","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/280694\/","title":{"rendered":"Eug\u00e8ne Atget at the ICP \u2014 an incomplete picture of a photography master"},"content":{"rendered":"

At his finest, Eug\u00e8ne Atget coaxed the visible world into harmony with his own temperament. Statues in the gardens of Versailles flex their stone muscles before his lens. Reflections in store windows animate mannequins that appear to mingle, wraith-like, with passers-by. The borders between the sentient and the inert start to blur, until the ordinary world trembles with quiet strangeness.<\/p>\n

The Atget in the International Center of Photography\u2019s new exhibition in New York is rarely at his finest. The ambitious but ultimately dispiriting homage \u2014 subtitled The Making of a Reputation \u2014 doesn\u2019t contribute much to his renown, demonstrate why it grew, or explain how it galvanised later photographers. I\u2019ve rarely seen a show in which the premise and its expression are so out of whack.<\/p>\n

Atget was a pivotal figure, tempering the 19th century\u2019s mania for precise realism with 20th-century attempts to wheedle magic from everyday life. For most of his career, from the late 1880s through to the 1920s, he regarded himself as a craftsman, supplying ready-made imagery to painters, architects and industrial designers. <\/p>\n

Determined to document a Paris under threat from modernisation, he schlepped his unwieldy tripod camera and heavy glass negatives around the city, recording twisty staircases, vertiginous alleys, door-knockers, courtyards and statuary. He avoided people, and his empty streetscapes have a haunted and haunting quality.<\/p>\n

\"A\u2018Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevi\u00e8ve\u2019 (1898) \u00a9 Eug\u00e8ne Atget<\/p>\n

\u201cNot for nothing were the pictures of Atget compared with those of the scene of a crime,\u201d Walter Benjamin wrote in 1927. \u201cBut is not every spot of our cities the scene of a crime? Every passer-by a perpetrator? Does not the photographer \u2014 descendent of augurers and haruspices \u2014 uncover guilt in his pictures?\u201d<\/p>\n

Benjamin read those images through the prism of surrealism, and with good reason. Man Ray, who had a studio two doors down from Atget\u2019s in Montparnasse, met his neighbour around 1923 and provided him an entr\u00e9e to Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s crowd. He also published one of his photos in the journal La R\u00e9volution surr\u00e9aliste.<\/p>\n

Man Ray\u2019s darkroom assistant, Berenice Abbott, was even more enthralled by Atget\u2019s optical imagination. Its impact, she wrote nearly 40 years later, \u201cwas immediate and tremendous. There was a sudden flash of recognition \u2014 the shock of realism unadorned. The subjects were not sensational, but nevertheless shocking in their very familiarity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abbott visited Atget in his studio regularly in the couple of years before he died in 1927. The ICP has one of the three towering portraits she made (and he never saw): pale-eyed gaze, wispy hair, an artist\u2019s furrowed face floating incongruously above a funereal necktie and a fine wool coat. He could be a slightly addled banker. Curator David Campany uses Abbott\u2019s admiration as a point of departure, arguing that Atget owed his eminence largely to her efforts on his behalf.<\/p>\n

\"A\u2018Escalier 25 rue des Blancs-Manteaux\u2019 (1903\u20134) \u00a9 Eug\u00e8ne Atget\"A\u2018\u00c9cole des Beaux-Arts, Monument Henri Regnault\u2019 (1903) \u00a9 Eug\u00e8ne Atget<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that it took a young American to shame the French into valuing their own national treasure. Abbott bought nearly 1,500 of his glass negatives and 8,000 prints, then printed more, talked magazines into publishing some of the pictures, and in 1930 shepherded a selection into a book. She was still magnifying his glory in 1968, when she sold most of her Atget archive to the Museum of Modern Art.<\/p>\n

But the exhibition tries to fuse two incompatible things: covering the four years just before and after his death, when Abbott was cheerleading with the greatest ardour; and furnishing the ICP\u2019s galleries from its own permanent collection. That hoard includes plenty of early work from the turn of the century but few of the later masterpieces. To see those, you must either squint at vintage periodicals in the vitrines or watch a slideshow of pages from the 1930 monograph.<\/p>\n

And so, for anyone familiar with the Atget canon, this is an exhibition marked by what\u2019s missing: street vendors; prostitutes; creepy reflective shopfronts chock-a-block with corsets, wigs and prosthetic limbs; lyrical, romantic shots of the Paris parks. Instead, we get an undistinguished catalogue of cast-iron banisters, balconies and gates.<\/p>\n

It was the shots from the 1920s that bewitched Abbott and that MoMA\u2019s noted historian John Szarkowski later singled out as Atget\u2019s supreme achievement. Alas, the photos here date from two decades earlier, before his technique had caught up with his eye. The idiosyncratically composed \u201cVersailles, Le Ch\u00e2teau\u201d (1902) takes in the palace from afar, bounded by a featureless platform on one side and scruffy scaffolding on the other. The winter view of \u201cVersailles, Le Parc\u201d (1901) recedes into the distance and, with its marooned statue and stand of tousled trees, introduces, but doesn\u2019t take full advantage of, Atget\u2019s resistance to the park\u2019s Gallic symmetries. Fortunately, he returned to the royal estate two decades later and came away with a series of truly original rhapsodies.<\/p>\n

\"The\u2018Versailles, Le Ch\u00e2teau\u2019 (1902) \u00a9 Eug\u00e8ne Atget\"A\u201cVersailles, Le Parc\u201d (1901\u20133) \u00a9 Eug\u00e8ne Atget<\/p>\n

Szarkowski concluded that \u201cperhaps 20 per cent of Atget\u2019s work\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009attains the formal surprise or original grace by which we identify a successful work of modern art.\u201d The ICP is strong on the other 80 per cent.<\/p>\n

It does, however, have one masterful landscape: the hazily luminous \u201cTrianon\u201d (c1923-26). Atget points his camera towards the sun, which flashes through a stand of tall trees and glimmers on feathery leaves and a lily-laden pond. Light gathers around a sculpture of indolent cherubs, who seem to be shaking off sleep. The scene is less about the spirit of the place than about the artist\u2019s sensibility, his search for the fulcrum between the real and the sublime.<\/p>\n

(It would be easier for viewers to feel this if they didn\u2019t have to struggle to see past the glare on the protective glass. How can an institution dedicated to photographs not have a better way of lighting them?)<\/p>\n

That single image is a reminder of major absences. We get not even one of the 25 moody vistas of the park at Saint-Cloud that Atget shot in 1926, culminating in an oddly asymmetrical, end-of-the-day panorama of trees mirrored in a reflecting pool. His long-term partner of more than 30 years died while he was working on the series, which simultaneously conjures the ancien r\u00e9gime, meditates on transience, and dwells on grief.<\/p>\n

It was this intense, almost tragic atmosphere of Atget\u2019s visions that electrified Abbott and sent her back to the US in 1929, hoping to find a publisher for her haul. She had planned a short trip, but after eight years away, she discovered that New York, too, was metamorphosing and shedding its old skin. Inspired by her idol, she stayed and documented the burgeoning, ruthlessly self-erasing metropolis, its sidewalks and bridges, towers and riverfront. She made herself New York\u2019s Atget.<\/p>\n

The man who nearly slipped into oblivion along with his beloved old Paris instead became a formative influence not just on Abbott, but also on Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Yet you\u2019d never glean that from this truncated tour. Somehow, a show that invokes the lasting importance of his reputation breaks off before viewers understand why it mattered.<\/p>\n

To May 4, icp.org<\/a><\/p>\n

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