Eugène Atget Photographs Sold by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston   

“The Atget prints are direct and emotionally clean records of a rare and subtle perception, and represent perhaps the earliest expression of true photographic art.”  – Ansel Adams

Born in Libourne, near Bordeaux in 1857 and orphaned as a child, Jean Eugène August Atget was raised by an uncle. He left school in his teens, working first as a cabin boy at sea before training as an actor at the National Conservatory of Music and Drama in Paris. In the late 1880s, Atget abandoned the stage for art, first taking up painting before turning to photography where he found inspiration in the street life and architecture of the capital.  

Atget’s initial intention was to supply photographs (or “documents”, as he termed them) to artists, architects and stage designers as source material for their own work. His focus expanded around 1900, however, in the face of the increasing modern transformation of Paris and consequent demolition of the city’s older neighborhoods in favor of grand facades, broad boulevards, and public parks. Atget became determined that his photographs should now become an enduring and encyclopedic record of the city’s rapidly vanishing architectural and cultural history.

Atget’s ambitious goal was accomplished using rudimentary, cumbersome and increasingly obsolete equipment. Rising before dawn, Atget lugged a bulky view camera, a tripod and glass negatives in their heavy wooden holders – almost forty pounds of equipment — through the city and into the surrounding countryside, often as far as Versailles and Saint-Cloud. These glass plates were later developed in his workroom and contact-printed on albumen papers on his roof.

Atget’s living was always meager; he sold to whomever saw merit in his work – to libraries and historical societies, who embraced its documentary aspects, and to other artists who admired its other more painterly qualities. Before World War I, enthusiasts included Henri Matisse, George Braque and Andre Derain. By the mid 1920s, Atget had become a favorite of the Surrealists, particularly Man Ray, who found his “naive” pictures revelatory and had a number of them published in La Révolution surréaliste in 1926.  

Berenice Abbott, Man Ray’s assistant, also a devotee, recalled that:

“My excitement at seeing these few photographs would not let me rest. Who was this man? I learned that Atget lived up the street from where I worked — at 17 bis rue Campagne Premiere and that his prints were for sale. Perhaps I could own some. I wanted to see more and lost no time in seeking him out. I mounted the four flights to his fifth-floor apartment. On the door was a modest handmade sign, ‘Documents pour Artistes’. He ushered me into a room approximately fifteen feet long, the ordinary room of a small apartment, sparsely and simply furnished. Atget, slightly stooped, impressed me as being tired, sad, remote, appealing. He was not talkative. He did not try to ‘sell’ anything. He showed me some albums, which he had made himself, and I selected as many prints as I could afford to pay for from my meager wages as a photographer’s assistant.”

Abbott remained Atget’s committed champion after his death, fighting to preserve his archive of around 5,000 vintage prints and more than 1,000 glass plate negatives, and initiating their transfer to New York City. Thanks to this intervention, Atget’s work was highly influential on successive generations of American photographers, from Walker Evans to Lee Friedlander. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchased Atget’s archive from Abbott and Julien Levy in 1968 and it is from this core group that this extraordinary selection of photographs, being sold on behalf of The Museum of Fine Art, Houston, originates. 

The selection presented here offers some significant highlights from Atget’s career – richly toned studies, all inscribed in pencil in his distinctive spidery hand – of such familiar Paris landmarks as Notre-Dame, Fête de la Villette, Moulin Rouge and Versailles, as well as a fascinating glimpses into less familiar places and preoccupations – a shadowy stairwell on the rue des Archives, a stark alleyway in the Gobelins, primroses in full bloom, a wintry tree at St. Cloud, or a jocular flower-seller. 

This auction offers collectors the unique opportunity to acquire significant examples of Eugene’s Atget’s work from a distinguished source, and Hindman is honored to have been entrusted with this important sale. Join us this December 6th for Eugène Atget Photographs Sold by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.