Lot 2: Cavalrie Legere/Cavaleria Ardente, c. 1935

Pierre Dubreuil (1872-1944) Cavalrie Legere/Cavaleria Ardente, c. 1935 gelatin silver print signed, numbered '88' in pencil (on the mount); signed 'P. Dubreuil, M. L. S. P.', titled, annotated in ink and 'Cercle Les Amateurs Photographes Belges' 1935 exhibition label (on the reverse of the mount) image: 9 1/8 x 7in. (23.2 x 17.8cm.) sheet: 9 1/4 x 7 1/8in. (23.5 x 18cm.) mount: 16 3/8 x 12 1/8in. (41.6 x 30.8cm.)

23.2 x 17.8cm.

Les Amateurs Photographes Belges, III Salon des A.P.B., Brussels, October - November 1935

With Houk Friedman Gallery, New York

During his lifetime, the career trajectory of French photographer Pierre Dubreuil paralleled that of American stalwarts Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Like his counterparts across the Atlantic, Dubreuil was an early champion of Pictorialism, the late-nineteenth century movement that sought to elevate the status of photography by producing photographs that emulated the Impressionist artistic style in vogue at the time. And like his counterparts, during the second half of his career his approach to photography was far more Modernist in approach, favoring hard lines, abstractions and close-ups. The image offered in this lot is an embodiment of the artist’s late period. Born into considerable wealth, Dubreuil began experimenting with the medium at age sixteen. Upon graduating high-school, the young Debreuil apprenticed under Louis-Jean Delton, whose work was typified by equestrian subject matter, a possible early influence on the work offered in this lot. Dubreuil’s talent and passion were evident early on, and in 1903, at the age of thirty-one, he was invited to join the prestigious Linked Ring Brotherhood in London, the European counterpart to Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession group formed the previous year in America. Invitation to the Ring was a stamp of approval into an exclusive cadre of artists, which included Frederick H. Evans and James Craig Annan. A year after his acceptance, Dubreuil adopted the oil print, championed by G.E.H Rawlins, as his favored printing mode for allowing the artist to exercise greater control over the contrast and tonality of the print. (The oil print would later become the base for the bromoil process, among the favored printing methods by the Pictorialists.) However, as opposed to his contemporaries, whose subject matter normally included romanticized bucolic landscapes or overly-staged interior tableaus, from an early point in his career Dubreuil focused on the exciting wonders of the Machine Age. In doing so, Dubreuil’s subject matter was aligned with the radicalism of Cubism and Futurism. During the 1920s Dubreuil’s style adopted a more modernist tone. Whereas early works from the 1910s were marked by the tension between foreground and background (at times relying on darkroom manipulations to achieve said effect), his works from the late 1920s onward, as exemplified by the current lot, featured close-ups that yielded reflections, refractions, abstractions and fragmentations. While carousels had been continually featured in early French photography (perhaps most notably by Eugene Atget), they were typically shown in their entirety and as a source of children’s entertainment. Under Dubreuil’s lens, however, the carousel horses are turned into a tight, geometric composition. Just as the Futurists aimed to capture the speed and motion of bicycles, motor cars and airplanes, Dubreuil’s horses are dynamic and animated. The composition is marked by a series of repeated diagonals that powerfully slice across the frame, infusing the image with a sense of excitement and immediacy. The gelatin silver printing of this print highlights the clarity, tonality and linearity of this wonderful Modernist composition. Following his sickness in the mid 1940s, Dubreuil sold his archive to the Gevaert photographic firm in Belgium, which was tragically bombed and destroyed during the Second World War. Prints by Dubreuil are very rare on the secondary market, and this is one of two known prints of this image, the second being an oil print.