This June we offer the work of four European photographers born within a span of 18 years, running from the late 19th century to just before the outbreak of the first World War.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) received a Jumelle box camera from his father when aged nine and over the next few years he set about recording his world: family members and friends at play – his older brother, Zissou, caught in daredevil stunts appeared frequently – along with his bedroom and rooms within his home. The viewer is presented with the activities and lifestyle of a bourgeois family, seen through the lens of an energetic and arguably indulged youngster. Lartigue’s father, Henri, was a wealthy businessman and Jacques and Zissou did not attend school, instead private tutors were employed to keep the boys amused and Henri once said, ‘I have plenty of money. My children should learn how to spend it’. Lartigue was a child of the Belle Epoque – running from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the outbreak of the first World War – a period of stability for France which was fuelled by the optimism and affluence generated by the 1889 World’s Fair held in Paris. At this time France’s educational, scientific and medical institutions were cutting edge, although of course the delights and entertainments of the era were not experienced and enjoyed across the board.
In Lartigue’s work of 1911, lot 86, comprising two prints, Jacques and Zissou carry out an experiment in which family pets, chickens and rabbits, are sent down a bespoke rollercoaster in a handmade car. The larger image shows the homemade track, emerging from a high-up window, and in the second smaller photograph a rabbit is released from the miniature vehicle after the rollercoaster ride, appearing to be unscathed. In his diary Lartigue wrote about the event, ‘…our hens and rabbits were lucky enough to find themselves…able to experience many strong acrobatic emotions which were denied to us!…After their free rides our small friends tottered away as if drunk – on excitement no doubt’. Lartigue’s subjects were to include speeding racing cars and glamorous fashion models, and he also worked at sporting events. His shots of the balletic, acrobatic tennis player, Suzanne Lenglen, reflected his inclination to capture movement and action, be it human or machine-generated. But, despite his large and varied image inventory, and his work as a painter, Lartigue only became known to a wider audience when in 1963 John Szarkowksi, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, saw his photographs and offered him a solo exhibition, which took place that Summer. After seeing Lartigue’s images in the show, for the first time, Richard Avedon wrote to his fellow photographer to express his delight, ‘It was one of the most moving experiences of my life…You brought me in to your world and isn’t that, after all, the purpose of art?’. The majority of the forty-two photographs in the show were donated by Lartigue to MoMA and from 1976 until 1986 Lartigue set about giving his own image archive to the French state. This pair of prints from 1911 were retained by Lartigue for his family and they remained in the possession of his third wife Florette until she passed away in 2000.
The Austro-British photographer Wolfgang Suschitzky (1912-2016) made England his home in 1935, having resided briefly in Amsterdam after fleeing Vienna’s Austrofascist regime which had seized power in 1934. Suschitzky graduated in photography from the School of Design and Graphic Arts, Vienna, but his true passion was zoology and his first exhibition held in London in 1940 featured pictures of animals, he also published ‘how to’ guides, in 1940 and 1941, in which he shared his hints for taking images of children and animals. His images of London, and specifically those of Charing Cross from the 1930s, have the most enduring resonance and five of the twelve Suschitzky images in the auction portray this central London location, in 1935 and 1936. In her obituary of Suschitzky, published in The Guardian, October 2016, Amanda Hopkinson described his work as ‘a paean to the dignity of labour’ – in lot 92, Coliseum Dairy, Charing Cross Road, November 1936, a milkman, dressed in an overcoat and hat, pushes a handcart loaded with milk bottles along the rain-drenched thoroughfare. Bendel’s (purveyors of hats and headwear, at no. 21) shop sign is neatly framed in the background. The Coliseum Dairy was in business at a key time in the history of UK public health which followed the introduction of milk pasteurisation, from its base at 13 Bedfordbury the Dairy distributed milk to nearby homes and businesses. In lot 100, from the same period, workmen are silhouetted against the steam emanating from hot tarmac as they work to cover the wooden blocks on Charing Cross Road. Here we see London transitioning from horse drawn carriages to motor vehicles, the blocks having originally been laid to soften the sound of horses’ hooves.
Suschitzky also had a prolific career as a freelance cameraman, and from his early years in London he had worked with the film-maker Paul Rotha (1907-1984), their collaboration included films such as Children of the City (1944), a dramatised study of deprived children in Dundee and The World is Rich (1948), an exploration of the mechanics of post-World War II food distribution. In 1971 Suschitzky was the cinematographer for Get Carter, the gangster thriller film starring Michael Caine, written and directed by Mike Hodges and shot in north-east England.
Suschitzky’s story-telling style is also seen in lots 91 and 93 in which road sweepers are the focus as they work in Westminster, seemingly oblivious to the camera. In lot 96 a shoe shiner is bent over and with his back to us as his male customer, and female companion, both smartly dressed, strike a pose for Suschitzky. In lot 95, Astoria Cinema, Charing Cross Road, 1936, night-time bustle is caught, with all but one person, peeking around a wall, walking away from us and dwarfed by two double-decker London buses bearing advertisements for Haig whisky, Shredded Wheat and, suitably, given the route, Film Weekly.
Suschitzky was somewhat re-discovered in the early years of the 21st century, he participated in the 2012 Tate Britain group show Another London: International Photographers Capture City Life: 1930-1980. In his 104th year, 2016, a selection of his work, along with images by Dorothy Bohm and Neil Libbert, was part of a major exhibition, Unseen, held at the Ben Uri Gallery, London, in which ‘overlooked’ images of London, Paris and New York were presented. In his own words Suschitzky believed that great photography is ‘a combination of the right choice of detail, the elimination of all that is inessential and the right moment that makes the picture’ – elements evident in many of his own images.
Lot 88, dated 1944, shows Henri Matisse in his studio, at Villa Le Rêve, Vence, France, accompanied by his beloved doves the maestro appears to be working on a maquette for one of his Reclining Nude sculptures. The shot was taken by Brassaï (Gyula Halász) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984), born in Transylvania, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His mother was Armenian, his father Hungarian and at the age of three he and his family lived in Paris for a year whilst Brassaï’s father taught at the Sorbonne. Brassaï studied painting and sculpture at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest, and joined the cavalry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army in which he served until end of World War I. In 1920 he was in Berlin working as a journalist for several Hungarian papers, and he became friends with various older Hungarian artists and writers, the group included the painters Lajos Tihanyi and Bertalan Pór – who were later to emigrate to Paris and form a Hungarian circle of artists and writers. Brassaï himself re-located to Paris in 1924 and he lived in the city for the rest of his life, he taught himself French by reading Proust and lived in the Montparnasse quarter. His love for Paris led him to continually explore its streets, and his photography (his tutor was his fellow Hungarian, André Kertész) subsidised his job as a journalist. He took the name Brassaï, meaning ‘from Brassó’, his birthplace, in tribute to the town he had left behind.
Brassaï published his first collection of Paris photographs, Paris de nuit, in 1933, it was extremely well received and Henry Miller, the writer and a resident of Paris in the 1930s, bestowed on him the moniker “the eye of Paris”. Brassaï took images of all of Paris: the seedier side of city life, as depicted in the lives of streetwalkers and scenes from brothels, to photographs of Parisian intellectuals, ballet and opera goers, with the nocturnal life of the inter-war years as lived in the heart of and on the fringes of society often portrayed.
Brassaï was a contemporary of Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Henri Matisse, and many prominent writers, notably Jean Genet and Henri Michaux. Six years prior to 1944, Brassaï had made images of Matisse (1869-1954) at his studio in Paris. In these the 70-year-old artist is calmly and contemplatively at work in a spacious and sparse environment, to which it is likely that only a fellow artist would have been admitted. Our later image likewise shows Matisse in another of his own milieu – it is far removed in mood from Brassaï’s more outré shots of Paris from the previous decade. Matisse had rented Villa Le Rêve in July 1943 to avoid the Allied bombings of Nice, here he created his Jazz series and designs for La Chapelle du Rosaire and he retained the Villa until 1949. Brassaï was to achieve international fame – in 1948 he had a one-man show at MoMA, New York, and more of his photographs were exhibited there in 1953, 1956, and 1968.
The French photographer, Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) was also captivated by Parisian street scenes, such as children spontaneously at play and away from parental supervision, along with Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) Doisneau is noted as a pioneer in story-telling through photography. By the age of seven he had lost both his mother and father and was being brought up by an aunt, at sixteen he took up amateur photography and a year later he secured diplomas in engraving and lettering. In the late 1920s Doisneau was working at a creative pharmaceutical graphics studio, he also acted as a camera assistant and progressed to the role of staff photographer. He sold his first photographic story to Excelsior magazine in 1932, he worked at Renault for five years and at the outbreak of World War II he was working on a freelance basis in advertising, engraving and postcard photography. In 1939 Rapho agency, founded in 1933 by Hungarian immigrant Charles Rado (1899-1970), engaged Doisneau and he travelled throughout France sourcing photographic stories. From 1940-45 Doisneau was both soldier and photographer in the French army, and he put his draughtsmanship, lettering and engraving skills to good use in forging passports for the French Resistance.
Lot 87, Soho, is dated 1950 the year when Doisneau made his only documented visit to London, his remit was to conduct freelance reportage photography for French magazines. In the image a man standing away from groups to his left and right hails a cab whilst standing in the street, all eyes appear to be on this central figure and we seem to be witnessing the end of an evening out in this lively part of the capital. Doisneau’s shots of pensive young boys in their school uniforms, shop windows, Westminster Bridge and Soho make up his London portfolio compiled during this visit. In the same year Doisneau was commissioned by the US magazine, Life, to take shots of Parisian lovers and one of these, Le Baiser de l’hôtel de ville, came to epitomise the spirit of young romance in the city and it is now perhaps Doisneau’s most recognised image.
Doisneau was to remain active, he produced children’s books, photography for advertising and took portraits of numerous artists: Alberto Giacometti, Jean Cocteau, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. He also worked with writers and poets such as Blaise Cendrars and his close friend Jacques Prévert, whom he acknowledged had encouraged him to photograph everyday street scenes of working life in Paris, images which have contributed to his enduring legacy.
The June Edit: 100 lots of Fine & Decorative Interiors | Bidding closes from 5pm Thursday 4 June
20th century Photographs from a Private Collection: lots 86-100
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