Eugène Atget

The photographer to Tristan Tzara, Paris

By descent to Marie-Therese Tzara

Christie’s New York, 29 April 1999, Sale 9150, Lot 166

Berenice Abbott, The World of Atget (New York, 1964), pl. 124

The Work of Atget, Volume IV: Modern Times (The Museum of Modern Art, 1985), p. 110, pl. 74

Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven, 1992), p. 28

Laure Beaumont-Maillet, Atget Paris (Santa Rosa, 1992), p. 759

John Szarkowski, Atget (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2000), p. 123

Garry Badger, Eugène Atget 55 (London, 2001), p. 93

This photograph comes originally from the collection of Tristan Tzara (1895-1963), poet, writer, and a founding father of the Dada movement in Zurich. Tzara likely encountered Eugène Atget’s work in the 1920s, while living near the photographer’s studio on rue Campagne-Première. Atget’s photographs, promoted by him as 'Documents pour Artistes,' were re-contextualized by the Parisian avant-garde, who saw in his images of Paris’s changing landscape, architecture, and street vendors, an unselfconscious, ‘automatic’ vision. Tzara would also undoubtedly have seen the Atget photographs reproduced in a famous 1926 issue of La Révolution Surréaliste, André Breton’s definitive Surrealist journal of the era.

La Villette, rue Asselin, fille publique faisant le quart devant sa porte, 19e comes from a series of photographs commissioned in 1921 by the Cubist painter André Dignimont, who intended to publish a book on Parisian prostitutes. Although the volume was never realized, Atget's few photographs for the project are now among his most arresting and complex. Taken in the working class area of Paris at the corner of Monjol and Asselin (today rue Turot), this study of a heavyset woman seated outside a dark, beckoning doorway could today be mistaken for a modern street portrait. One might expect something more sensational for a photograph of a prostitute, but in Atget's study, all traces of eroticism or pornography, long a part of the photographic tradition, are lacking. It has been suggested that Dignimont, a collector of erotica, did not find the pictures to his liking and therefore did not acquire them. 

The prostitutes are among the least numerous of all of Atget's subjects, and consequently extant prints of them are scarce. A print of the image now in the collection of Musée d’Orsay, Paris, was gifted by Marie-Thérèse et André Jammes. Only two other prints of this image are believed to have been offered at auction, including a photograph sold in April 2011 originally from the collection of Julien Levy.