Francis Bruguière

mounted, credited to the photographer and numbered '#12' in an unidentified hand in pencil on the reverse, matted, framed, circa 1929

Acquired from the photographer by Julien Levy, Connecticut

Acquired by The Witkin Gallery, New York, from the above, 1977

Edwynn Houk Gallery, Chicago, 1983

Acquired by the Quillan Company from the above, 1989

New York, The Witkin Gallery, Inc., Photographs from the Julien Levy Collection, October - November 1977

This print:

Jill Quasha, The Quillan Collection of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Photographs (New York, 1991), pl. 42

Photographs from the Julien Levy Collection (New York: The Witkin Gallery, 1977, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 10

This photograph is on paper with a glossy surface. When it is viewed closely in raking light, a very faint diagonal 6-inch scratch, which does break the emulsion, is visible on the left side of the image. Also visible only in raking light are two small raised areas caused by particles trapped between the print and mount in the upper right corner. There is silvering on the print's edges, appropriate for a photograph of this age. The photograph is mounted on thick, brittle board which is chipped at the top corners and has a small tear on its lower right edge.
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Francis Bruguière's cut-paper compositions are among the medium's first abstract works.  One of the few camera artists who moved convincingly from Pictorialism to Modernism, his other multi-faceted experiments included photographs of projected light patterns, photomontage, and film.  Although scarce today, Bruguière's photographs were widely shown in his own time, in exhibitions as diverse as the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in Buffalo in 1910 and Stuttgart's influential Film und Foto in 1929.   A significant number of his works were collected by the one of the greatest connoisseurs of Modernism, Julien Levy, who originally owned the print offered here.  This print is accompanied by a typed letter of provenance, signed by Levy, on Witkin Gallery stationery.

Born in San Francisco, Bruguière first studied photography under Stieglitz associate Frank Eugene in 1905, and his early work was done in the Pictorialist manner.  In the 'teens, Bruguière's work became more experimental, as he began to explore the creative possibilities of multiple exposure.  In the early 1920s, he opened a studio in New York, where he worked for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, and Vanity Fair, while at the same time pursuing his own creative work.  It was then that he began photographing cut-paper constructions.  Carefully arranged and meticulously lit, these then-unprecedented studies convey a sense of three-dimensionality, and are an early antecedent to similar studies that Frederick Sommer would make four decades later. 

Julien Levy recognized the importance of Bruguière's photographs, and exhibited them in his New York gallery.  The work fit into Levy's prescient and idiosyncratic approach to showing new photography by both European and American artists, including Moholy-Nagy, Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Maurice Tabard, and Berenice Abbott.  Five Bruguière cut-paper photographs that belonged to Levy are in institutional collections: four in the Julien Levy Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, and one in the Lynne and Harold Honickman Gift of the Julien Levy Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  The presentation of these photographs at both institutions closely resembles that of the print offered here, including the penciled attribution to the photographer in an unidentified hand on the reverse of the mounts.

As of this writing, only one other print of the present image has been located, at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York.  The Eastman House print is annotated, '#17 Design based upon a leaf' on the reverse.