The Libourne Museum of Fine Arts is devoting an exhibition to this child of the country who became an internationally renowned photographer. 76 of his photographs are on view, at the Chapelle du Carmel, until February 19, 2023.
He left the city where he was born at the age of 5, an orphan, entrusted to the maternal family living in Bordeaux. Eugène Atget probably never returned to Libourne. An internationally recognized photographer, his birthplace is finally paying homage to him with an exhibition organized by its Museum of Fine Arts.
76 original prints of his photographs – among the 10,000 he made – are exhibited at the Chapelle du Carmel, along with some documents. Apart from his birth certificate provided by the archives of the city of Libourne, everything is made available by the Carnavalet museum in Paris.
Testimony of the living
In principle, this is the second exhibition devoted to this photographer in Libourne; the first, dating from 1980, consisted of a traveling set of facsimiles of the photographs. But in reality, the “in-depth work” that Caroline Fillon, director of the museum and curator of the current exhibition, is keen to underline, makes this event the first of such importance.
Admittedly, the Chapelle du Carmel offers a modest surface. But its space is considered, thanks to the scenography of Benjamin Beiget, so as to stir up the many centers of interest of the photographer who made an inventory of Paris at the end of the 19th century.e century and the beginning of the XXe : the architecture, the streets and alleys, the shop fronts, the small trades, the horse-drawn carriages, the door knockers…
“He wanted to immortalize the Paris that disappears with Haussmann’s works: the places, the districts, and those who live and work there. It is an urban testimony, but also a testimony of the living”, comments Caroline Fillon.
Through his sometimes precise, sometimes poetic gaze, Eugène Atget is thus presented to offer the public a revealing panel of his work. Other elements complete the exhibition, such as the presentation on a video screen of the sixteen fragile negatives owned by the Libourne museum or the links between the photographs of the Libournais and the works of painters such as Georges Braque, Maurice Utrillo or Jean Cocteau. The spectator will be able to discover the example of the “Flower Quay” by the painter Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Reims.
posthumous glory
Few biographical elements are known of Eugène Atget, from his birth on February 12, 1857 at 51 rue Clément-Thomas in Libourne, to his death on August 4, 1927 in Paris, without children or heirs. After the sudden death of his father, he grew up in Bordeaux, on the right bank, on the banks of the Garonne, where port activity offered him his first jobs. The young man, however, dreamed of becoming an actor and moved to Paris at the end of the 1870s to take acting lessons.
His skills on the boards are no match for his passion. He then turned to photography. He succeeds in selling his photos to painters who need images for models and to institutions which want to preserve the memory of a capital in the process of modernization, such as the Carnavalet museum. These financial income thus allow him to finance his activity and to live modestly with his companion, the actress Valentine Delafosse-Compagnon.
His art will only give him posthumous recognition thanks to an American photographer Berenice Abbott, who knew him at the end of his life and made two of his portraits visible in the Carmel Chapel.
The one who was Man Ray’s assistant in Paris helped to publicize the work of the photographer from Libourne following his death by buying his studio fund. Glory was born across the Atlantic and France discovered the name of Atget (Atgette, pronounced in the American way), before seizing the incredible modernity of the photographic art of Atget (Atgé, in the French way).
