MAON, 19th and 20th century art museum in Rende (CS)
18 March 2017, 6pm
Inauguration of the Exhibition
NADAR
Il teatro della fotografia
edited by Tonino Sicoli and Marcello W. Bruno
At the MAON, Museum of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Art in Rende (Cosenza), the exhibition opens on March 18th at 6pm “NADAR - THE THEATRE OF PHOTOGRAPHY” curated by Tonino Sicoli, art critic and director of the MAON, and by Marcello W. Bruno, professor of Contemporary Photography at the University of Calabria.
This is the first institutional monographic exhibition in Italy of the photography pioneer (until June 10, 2017). The exhibition consists of over sixty original works by the famous photographer plus a dozen by his son who shared his Parisian studio. These are albumen and silver salt photographs, including the first photos taken with artificial light in the history of photography. They are mostly portraits of people of the time, actresses, actors, showgirls, dancers, theater scenes, etc., from 1850 to the early twentieth century. Among the others, the portraits of the actresses Sarah Bernhadt, Jeanne de Marsy (the actress painted by Manet in Spring) and Gabrielle Rejane, of the writer Theophile Gautier, of Napoleon III and of the President of the French Republic Armand Fallieres stand out. Also on display are some works by his son Paul, who continued his father's activity.
«With Nadar, it is not only photography that has its pioneer but all of modern art, which not only begins with the exhibition of the Impressionists in his Parisian studio at no. 35 Boulevard des Capucines but receives from him a perceptive prototype of the world, a new model of vision. A new concept is emerging, which implants in painting a vagueness and a summary of forms and colors, in terms of impression.
The impression is what remains on the retina of the eye but it is also the mark left on the emulsified plate. And at the dawn of the darkroom to impress the plate the exposure times were very long, even several minutes; which is why even small movements in front of the lens made the image uncertain, blurring it more or less slightly. Since the mid-nineteenth century Nadar frequented and portrayed not only many artists and intellectuals of the time (Hugo, Baudelaire, Verne, Gautier, Rossini, Dumas, Dorè ...) but between the Sixties and Seventies he became friends with the protagonists of the impressionist movement such as Manet, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Degas, Cézanne. He mainly portrays actors, actresses, opera singers, showgirls, dancers, theater and entertainment personalities, who pose for him in the studio reproducing their attitudes, scenes, expressions. The cartes de visite and carte de cabinet made for the stars of the show, in stage poses or in three-quarter and profile portraits, are an early form of advertising, of diffusion of the image to an audience increasingly captured by social communication.» (Tonino Sicoli)
«The poet Yves Bonnefoy, starting from the exegesis of literary works by Mallarmé and Maupassant, comes to identify the specific legacy of the photographic revolution in nineteenth-century society: the ability to mechanically capture the casual detail, something impossible for all previous non-achiropite images, causes the Nothing in person to burst into Western culture, or the perception of a pure gaze devoid of sense, of seeing without knowing. But alongside the effect of Nothing, photography also brings with it an “effect of being”, and therefore it is the photographers themselves who can resist the nihilism of the image by achieving the synthesis of presence; and Bonnefoy cites first of all that “great spirit” of Nadar – his portraits of Gérard de Nerval, of Marceline Debordes-Valmore, of Baudelaire – for the ability to transform the very precariousness and fleetingness of bodies into a sign of a human presence: modernity, in short, returned to the transcendence.
A 2014 essay concludes: “In his photographs, Nadar was perfectly right to research, to respect the gazes. They were enough to evoke the possible that remains alive in a reality that seems dead. They were enough to preserve the invention of photography from its deleterious virtualities. It was no longer the spectral outside, the nothingness, that made its entrance into the masked ball [reference to Poe], but the fresh morning air, when the lights go out.” Of course, the Nadar atelier also produced other things, from supposedly scientific photographs to Disderi-style cartes de visite, but it is in the large-format portraits that the miracle of the encounter between the individuality of the “subject” and the individuality of the photographer takes place.» (Marcello W. Bruno)
Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (1820-1910), known as Nadar, is one of the most influential French artists of the second half of the nineteenth century. The pseudonym Nadar derives from a play on words, which combines the suffix "dar" with the family surname: Tournadar, which is pronounced "tourne à dard" and refers to his portraiture ability to sting like an arrow.
Born in Paris, Nadar was a journalist first in Lyon and then in Paris, where he moved at the end of the 1830s. In the French capital, Nadar successfully began his activity as a caricaturist, which ended with the publication of the lithograph Panthéon Nadar (1854), a collection of over 300 caricatures of politicians, intellectuals and famous people of the time. In 1856 Nadar opened his own studio on the central and strategic Boulevard des Capucines. The studio, painted red both inside and out to indicate his political position, became a real company that his son Paul Nadar (1856-1939) inherited in 1895. The studio on Boulevard des Capucines was frequented by the French elite. Politicians, artists and intellectuals of the time – including Victor Hugo, Richard Wagner, Édouard Manet, Charles Baudelaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Giuseppe Verdi, Auguste Rodin, etc. – flocked to have their portraits painted. Nadar became famous as a portraitist with an unmistakable style: three-quarter pose and medium shot; the subject’s gaze straight towards the lens; neutral background; chiaroscuro effect due to the natural light entering from above through the studio’s skylight; lateral artificial lighting; photographer's signature on the photo.
Subverting the classic rules of portraiture, Nadar creates a portrait with a psychological and introspective character. Furthermore, the pictorial effect of the image earned him the nickname "Titian of photography". In 1858, he took clear aerial shots of Paris by flying over the city with a hot air balloon on which he had set up a darkroom. A pioneer of flight, therefore, but also of aerial photography. His documentation of the sewers and catacombs of Paris is famous. Another record by Nadar: the shots were taken with the help of artificial light. In 1863, he founded the magazine "L'Aéronaute". He later commissioned the aeronaut brothers Louis and Jules Godard to build the enormous hot air balloon Le Géant, thirty metres in diameter.
Thousands of people watched Le Géant's first flight, including the writer Jules Verne, who was inspired by his friend Nadar in some of his novels. A few years later, he opened a studio in Marseille. He retained ownership of the studio on Boulevard des Capucines, which became a venue for cultural events, such as the first Impressionist exhibition in April 1874, a significant event in the history of art and further proof of Nadar's artistic vivacity. However, in the last years of his life, Nadar abandoned photography to devote himself to writing.
In 1900, he published his autobiography Quand j’étais photographe. He died at the age of ninety in 1910.
