Pierre Dubreuil 1872-1944

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Description

Pierre Dubreuil
'spectacles'

oil print, the photographer's monogram on the image, signed, titled, and annotated ‘Bruxelles,’ ‘Oil print,’ ‘London, Salon,’ and ‘M. S. L. P. -- M. C. P. S. A.’ by the photographer in ink and with the Museum's collection stamp, label, and accession number in an unidentified hand in red crayon on the reverse, circa 1929

Provenance

The photographer to Dr. Max Thorek

Gift of Dr. Max Thorek, December 1935

Exhibited

Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, Imagination to Image, April - September 1999; and traveling thereafter to The Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee, September - December 2000; and The Montclair, New Jersey, Art Museum, January - April 2001

Literature

For another image from this series, see Tom Jacobson, Pierre Dubreuil, Photographs 1896 – 1935 (San Diego, 1987, in conjunction with the exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou), fig. 23

Catalogue Note

There are believed to be six or seven prints of Spectacles extant, two of them in the collection of a European museum.

In addition to the image offered here, Dubreuil executed a number of similar still-life studies utilizing spectacles. One variant is illustrated in the above-referenced book by Dubreuil scholar Tom Jacobson. Another variant, entitled Luminous Sketch, was offered in these rooms in the sale of Property from the Collection of Graham Nash (25 April 1990, Sale 6003, Lot 139). A print made from the same negative as the version offered here, but presented by Dubreuil in a horizontal format, was sold in the sale of the Barry Friedman Collection (Christie’s New York, 5 October 1998, Sale 9026, Lot 46).

Dubreuil, an expert at photographic lighting, and directly attuned to a lens’s capability to affect the path of light, clearly enjoyed experimenting with spectacles as subject matter. His various arrangements, in which one or two pairs of spectacles interact with light, are full of the photographer’s characteristic imagination. The print of Spectacles offered here cleverly documents the basic elements of photography: lenses and light.

During Dubreuil’s lifetime, this version of Spectacles was exhibited in 8 International Kerstsalon, Antwerp, in 1934 and 1935; Il Salon International, Charleroi; and the retrospective of Dubreuil’s work at the Royal Photographic Society, London, in 1935. The image was also included in the two major modern Dubreuil exhibitions: Pierre Dubreuil, Photographs 1896 – 1935 at the Musee d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, in 1987; and Pierre Dubreuil Rediscovered, at The Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, in 1988, and traveling to Alliance Française, New York, and The Detroit Institute of Arts, in 1989-90.