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Lot Essay
Eugène Atget’s haunting study in the park at Saint Cloud, to the west of Paris, comes from an extended survey he made of this peculiarly engaging site. An artist by nature, Atget found his professional vocation as a photographer, quietly, steadily, systematically documenting the streets, façades, architecture, parks, landscape details, and fringes of the city. His overt purpose was to make a visual repertoire of imagery as reference for the use of artists, which he announced as ‘landscapes, animals, flowers, monuments, documents, and foregrounds for painters’. He made a living, but lived in the shadows; and were it not for the serendipitous salvage of his archives by the Museum of Modern Art through the good offices of Berenice Abbott, a great deal of his oeuvre may have been lost for ever and his reputation become the victim of his own modesty.
History and scholarship, notably the work undertaken by Maria Morris Hambourg under the auspices of John Szarkowski at MoMA, have effectively consolidated his reputation, which today is considerable—a reputation based on his rare ability to make documents that went beyond the documentary and reflected the poetry and metaphor that Atget found in his still, mostly inanimate subjects.
The present study of steps against a backdrop of trees at Saint Cloud is a picture seemingly inhabited by ghosts—the ghosts of those Royals and notables who had built, elaborated and occupied the Château de Saint-Cloud, home to Philippe I and Philippe II, Ducs d’Orléans, the latter Regent from 1715 to 1723; the ghost of Marie Antoinette, who further extended the Château; and the ghosts of both Napoleon I and Napoleon III, before the Château’s eventual destruction in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. Here too we encounter the ghosts of previous photographers, for the location had attracted such talented ‘primitifs’ as Louis Regnault and Louis Robert, in whose footsteps Atget worked so successfully to capture the spirit and romance present in the enigmatic, crumbling stone traces of past lives.
History and scholarship, notably the work undertaken by Maria Morris Hambourg under the auspices of John Szarkowski at MoMA, have effectively consolidated his reputation, which today is considerable—a reputation based on his rare ability to make documents that went beyond the documentary and reflected the poetry and metaphor that Atget found in his still, mostly inanimate subjects.
The present study of steps against a backdrop of trees at Saint Cloud is a picture seemingly inhabited by ghosts—the ghosts of those Royals and notables who had built, elaborated and occupied the Château de Saint-Cloud, home to Philippe I and Philippe II, Ducs d’Orléans, the latter Regent from 1715 to 1723; the ghost of Marie Antoinette, who further extended the Château; and the ghosts of both Napoleon I and Napoleon III, before the Château’s eventual destruction in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. Here too we encounter the ghosts of previous photographers, for the location had attracted such talented ‘primitifs’ as Louis Regnault and Louis Robert, in whose footsteps Atget worked so successfully to capture the spirit and romance present in the enigmatic, crumbling stone traces of past lives.