Artists

Eugène Carrière, Eugène Atget

Press release

Mennour presents for the first time a dialogue between the photographs of Eugène Atget (1857-1927) and the paintings of Eugène Carrière (1849-1906), two contemporary artists in the Paris of the 19th century which witnessed the emergence of a new modernity.

The invention a photography at the beginning of the 19th century profoundly transformed the history of painting. Since it was possible to record realist scenes with the help of a camera obscura, how were the painters, in their mimetic relation to nature, to adapt and find new avenues? Rather than compete with this new technique, the most audacious among them tried to differentiate themselves from the fixed and “objective” image of photography by venturing onto new terrains, more expressive and impressionist. As for photography, it constantly worked at freeing itself from the technique until it became an art practice in its own right. While photographers were fighting the kinetic “fuzziness” of the camera, painters were trying, on the opposite, to reproduce it in the painting, claiming that models, even fixed, are always moving as long as they are alive. It is in that ambivalence that Atget and Carrière’s respective works are to be found, and posterity eventually recognised both artists as precursors.

Atget and Carrière probably never met, though they were contemporaries and both lived in the same neighbourhood. While Atget was walking the streets of Paris to document all its shop windows, carriage entrances that give a glimpse of the inner courtyards or the streets of a Paris about to dramatically change, Carrière chose the solitude of his Parisian apartment in which the hustle and bustle of everyday life and the familiarity of his recurrent models were sources of inspiration. Carrière never took photographs, however, his paintings in monochrome tones are reminiscent of those of the prints on albumin-coated paper made by Atget. That said, both artists worked systematically and went back on the same subjects, time and again. For Atget, it was the streets, details in the architecture, flowers, and rarely human figures. Photographs whose framing became more and more defined, more and more constructed, despite the modest ambition to produce “documents for artists”, which he displayed on his studio sign. As for Carrière, he favoured his wife and children, his loved ones caught in their daily activities, doing again and again the same portraits of women, often his wife, of maternities and landscapes. Atget like Carrière searching in the inframince of a new detail, for the endless desire to start all over again.

— Christian Alandete, curator of the exhibition