Raoul Ubac

The collection of André Breton, Paris

Calmels Cohen, Paris, André Breton, 42, rue Fontaine, 15 April 2003, Lot 5062

Paris, Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Exposition internationale du surréalisme, 1938

Paris, Musée national d'art moderne / Centre Georges Pompidou, André Breton, la beauté convulsive, April - August 1991

Paris, Musée national d'art moderne / Centre Georges Pompidou, La Révolution surréaliste, March - June 2002

Düsseldorf, K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Surrealismus 1919-1944, July-November 2002

Minotaure, No. 10, Winter 1937, p. 38 (there titled “Le Triomphe de la Stérilité”)

Raoul Ubac 1910-1985 (Eupen, Belgium, 1996), p. 59

Gérard Durozoi, Histoire du movement surréaliste (Paris, 1997), p. 247

Christian Bouqueret, Raoul Ubac: Photographie (Paris, 2000), cover and pp. 67 and 252

The photograph offered here was given in 1937 by Raoul Ubac to André Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement.  Breton was a significant influence upon Ubac, who cited his reading of Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto as ‘a revelation and a calling’.  His admiration for Breton is reflected in his inscription on the photograph, which refers to Breton’s 1932 book, Les Vases Communicant. The underlying thematic motif of Breton’s book is that of the scientific apparatus, communicating vessels: two containers, connected by a small passageway, in which fluids will settle to the same level.  Breton believed that the surreal, nighttime world of dreams could be balanced in a similar way with the daytime world of fact, and that this equalization would unlock the creative act.  Ubac’s Penthesliée series, inspired by the Greek mythology of Penthesilea, warrior-queen of the Amazons, plays with these themes. The result of solarization, collage, and photomontage, images from this series depict abstracted female forms clashing – or, in the photograph offered here, melding together – in configurations that are at once erotic and darkly disturbing.  

Ubac’s lifetime output was limited and extant prints, especially large exhibition prints such as the one offered here, are scarce.  Prints of other images from the Penthesliée series are in the collections of The Cleveland Art Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.