Maurice Tabard 1897-1984

Another print of this image:

Pierre Gassmann, Rosalind Kraus, and Caroline Elissagaray, Maurice Tabard (Paris, 1987), pl. 96

Like his contemporaries, Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Maurice Tabard’s practice of photography encompassed a wide variety of techniques and processes.  The image offered here, in which a negative and a transparency were combined during printing into a complexly layered composition, is illustrative of Tabard’s unique and multifaceted approach to making photographic images. 

Born in France, Maurice Tabard moved to New Jersey at the age of 17 when his father, a silk manufacturer, relocated to work at the silk mills in Paterson in 1914.  Tabard worked as a silk designer while studying art and, ultimately, photography.  He studied at the New York Institute of Photography in 1916, and went on to work in a Bachrach studio in Baltimore in 1922.  Upon returning to France in 1928, Tabard met Man Ray and entered into the circle of the Surrealists.  His increasingly adventurous approach to photography encompassed the techniques of photomontage (see Lots 163 and 164), photogram (Lot 162), and solarization, and his work was published in the progressive periodicals Bifur,  Arts et Métiers Graphiques, and Art et Decoration.  Tabard’s photographs were shown in Julien Levy’s pioneering Modern European Photographers exhibition in New York in 1932, alongside images by Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, and Herbert Bayer, among other photographers working at the avant-garde forefront of the medium (cf. L’Amour Fou, p. 235; and Dreaming in Black and White: Photography at the Julien Levy Gallery, p. 52).

Tabard’s photomontage technique involved sandwiching multiple negatives together, and then contact-printing them onto a sheet of photographic paper, creating an overlay of images.  In the present photomontage, Tabard offers a variation on the process in which one of the image components – that of the standing nude – is a conventional negative, and the other – a bust portrait of a woman with reversed (negative) tones – is a positive transparency.  Tabard used both components in other compositions (cf.  Maurice Tabard, pp. 79 and 97, and a photomontage sold in these rooms on 10 October 2005, Sale 8164, Lot 25).  The transparency’s position within the present photomontage is purposely off-register, and its edge, visible in the right portion of the image, has become a vital part of the composition.