Maurice Tabard 1897-1984

mounted to Bristol board, signed and dated by the photographer in pencil on the mount, the photographer's 'Photo Maurice Tabard Paris' stamp and stamped '32-11' on the reverse, matted, 1932

Collection of Charles Cowles, New York

Sotheby's New York, 5 November 1984, Sale 5232, Lot 275

Private Collection

Christie's New York, 9 October 1997, Sale 8748, Lot 82

Acquired by Nancy Richardson from the above

This photograph is on paper with a very slightly warm tonality and a matte surface. It is essentially in excellent condition. Faint silvering, appropriate for a print of this age, is visible in the print's dark areas. The print is mounted to thin Bristol board which is very lightly soiled on the front and reverse.
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Like his contemporaries, Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, Maurice Tabard's practice of photography encompassed a wide variety of techniques and processes.  The image offered here, in which multiple negatives have been combined during printing to create 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, the photogram, 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 image, Tabard has paired a negative of a hand with that of a shadow on pavement.  Hands - and gloves - figure prominently in Tabard's work, and the hand negative in this image is a component of at least two other Tabard photomontages: Mains Surimpressions, of 1931 (Christian Bouqueret, Des Anées Folles aux Anées Noires, pl. 44), in which the negative is used twice; and Composition (Surimpression), circa 1928, in which the hand is superimposed over the face of a female model (Pierre Gassman, et al., Maurice Tabard, pl. 60).