Eugène Atget/Provenance and Significant Collections
From George Eastman House : Notes On Photographs
| Eugène Atget | ||
|---|---|---|
| Key Attributes : Technique · Significant Marks · Conservation · Subject Series | ||
| General Information : Biography · Provenance and Significant Collections · References and Bibliography | ||
During his lifetime Atget sold his original prints to many institutions and private clients.
In the first volume of The Work of Atget (see bibliography), Maria Morris Hambourg states that after Atget's death in 1927, the executor of his estate, André Calmette, divided the work in two parts:
- 2,000 negatives were placed in the care of the Commission des Monuments Historiques (likely Atget himself directed Calmette to do so, since this agency was one of his clients). It is not clear how these negatives were selected, and if they were donated or purchased.
- 1,300 glass negatives and around 5,000 original prints were packed by Calmette and left in Atget's studio. They were purchased by Berenice Abbott (in joint ownership with Julien Levy) in 1928, together with a bound volume of mounted photographs entitled "L'Art dans le Vieux Paris," a handwritten book stamped "Répertoire" containing names and adresses of customers, and about eighty-five paper albums. This collection was sold to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968.
Stray prints appear in artists' albums from time to time, such as the ones acquired by Philadelphia painter Milton Bancroft when studying in Paris, pasted into an album currently in the collection of Daniel Wolf, Inc., NY.
Contents |
GEH Collection Description
Eugène Atget. Approximately 500 photographs.
The George Eastman House holdings span Atget’s career, from 1898 to 1927, though its strength is pre World War I. The years 1901, 1907, and 1908 are especially well represented.
The collection is organized into ten series. Eight of the series are the same that Atget used: Landscape Documents, Picturesque Paris I, II, III, Art of Old Paris, Environs, Topography of Old Paris, and Interiors. The other two series are a portfolio of modern prints of Atget’s work printed from original negatives by Berenice Abbott and a group of nearly 50 Atget photographs that belonged to Man Ray, the Surrealist painter and photographer. Atget’s photographs of store windows, mannequins, and window reflections are well represented in the Man Ray series.
GEH Collection Provenance
GEH owns 498 prints by Atget, including a unique group known as the Man Ray Album--47 prints acquired by Man Ray from Atget himself, gathered in an album and purchased by the Museum in 1952. In the Man Ray album see Susan Laxton Paris As Gameboard, Man Ray’s Atgets, New York: Columbia University, 2002 .
Man Ray Album
 Recto |
 Verso |
 Front Cover |
 Interior |
In 1952 Beaumont Newhall, then Director of GEH, was contacted through Kodak-Pathé of Paris, to purchase a group of Atget photographs from the collection of "Madame Louette" of Boulogne-sur-Seine. The collection of 100 images was purchased for $285. Maria Morris Hambourg would later reveal that these prints were in reality assembled by a Paris bookseller named Alain Brieux who purchased the prints from an estate sale in 1950.
In October 1952 GEH purchased the Man Ray Album for $600.
In 1953 a group of more than 300 photographs by Atget were purchased for $275 from Pierre Berès, Inc., dealers in rare books and prints. These were acquired in the 1950s in Paris but there is no record of the source. In 1956 the Museum purchased 20 silver gelatin prints by Berenice Abbott from Atget's original negatives. This untitled portfolio was produced in an edition of 100.
Significant Collections
- GEH-498 prints
- Philadelphia Museum of Art-from the Julian Levy Collection of photographs, 361 works by Atget.
- Getty Museum-295 prints
- National Gallery of Canada-140 prints. 119 acquired from the MoMA (duplicate images from the Abbott-Levy Collection); remaining prints were purchased from private collectors or donated by Dorothy Meigs Eidlitz and David M. Heath.
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- Museum of Modern Art, New York-acquired approximately 5,000 prints and 1,300 negatives in 1968 (Abbott-Levy Collection)
- The following excerpts were found in Camille Moore's paper, “An Analytical Study of Eugène Atget’s Photographs at the Museum of Modern Art” published in the journal Topics in Photographic Preservation, Volume Twelve (2007).
- “After his death, Atget’s friend, André Calmettes divided his work into two categories, photographs of historic Paris and photographs on all other subjects. He donated the photographs of historic Paris to the French government and sold the other half to…Berenice Abbott.” [1]
- “During the Depression in the 1930’s, Abbott sold half of her collection to Julian Levy” [1]
- “Levy was unable to sell many of the prints, and allowed Abbott to keep possession of them. In the late 1960’s Abbott and Levy sold the collection of Atget’s to The Museum of Modern Art. As MoMA cought it, the collection contained 1415 glass negatives and nearly 8,000 vintage prints from over 4,000 distinct negatives.” [1]
Exhibition History
Exhibition History - Document compiled by Anne Maryanski in the ambit of the Ryerson University Program in Photographic Preservation & Collections Management