Maurice Tabard 1897-1984

There are few recorded examples of Maurice Tabard’s photograms.  Aside from the image offered here, only two other photograms have appeared at auction in recent decades.  Only one photogram (location unknown) is illustrated in the standard monograph on the photographer’s work, Maurice Tabard (Paris, 1987).  In Florent Neusüss’s and Renate Heyne’s Das Fotogramm in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Cologne, 1990), the authors reproduce three works by Tabard, including a photogram of a hand and pencil used in an advertisement for the Devambez design studio in Paris (p. 163).  The two other works illustrated by Neusüss and Heyne appear to be cameraless images made by drawing on photographic paper with developer.  As such, they are fundamentally different in nature from the photogram offered here, which was made by placing objects directly upon the sheet of photographic paper and exposing it to light. 

While Tabard’s photograms are scarce, they are central to his creative approach to photography.  Tabard’s selection of objects for use in these unique images is analogous to his selection of the negatives for his photomontages (see Lots 161, 163, and 164).  Frequently, favored objects (and negatives) were pressed into service in a number of images.  The large protruding shape uppermost in the photogram offered here is the socket end of a light bulb, possibly for a photographic enlarger or a projector. This object makes an appearance in one of the few Tabard photograms previously offered at auction (Christie’s New York, 5 October 1998, Sale 9026, Lot 51).  The serrated object on the left side of the image may also be included in the photogram reproduced in Maurice Tabard (pl. 47).  

In the present image, the foreshortened figure of a crescent wrench extends from the central cluster of objects.  While this wrench appears only in the photogram offered here, Tabard typically incorporated other utilitarian objects into his photograms.  A draftsman’s compass and a comb are the central figures in one (Maurice Tabard, p. 47), and a pencil and hand appear in the Devambez image (Neusüss, p. 163).  Tabard’s use of another quotidian object, the light bulb, in two of his photograms, including the one offered here, is significant given that the exposing light source for these photograms may have been just such a bulb.  In the photogram sold at auction in 1998, the light bulb is included with a coiled length of motion picture film.  In the present photogram, the bulb is combined more enigmatically within the central composition of largely abstracted objects.