Sep 21, 2021 - Sale 2579

Sale 2579 - Lot 4

Price Realized: $ 3,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000

EUGÈNE ATGET (1857-1927)


Le Soldat Laboureur par Lemaire (Tuileries, Paris).
Albumen print, the image measuring 215.9x177.8 mm; 8 1/2x7 inches, with Atget's title and inventory number, in pencil, on verso. Circa 1910.

Atget's fin de siècle photography was exhibited alongside Berenice Abbott's New York imagery at the newly-opened Galerie Zabriskie, Paris as early as 1977, representing, extraordinarily, the first commercial exhibition for the French photographer. Abbot and Atget are inextricably linked, Abbott first encountering the elderly French photographer's work in 1925 at the Man Ray Studio. After Atget's death, in 1927, she collaborated with Julien Levy, of New York's Julien Levy Gallery, to buy most of Atget's negatives and prints, bringing them back to New York in 1929. Abbott's initiative preserved Atget's archive, which, given its influence on the avant-garde, has become an important chapter of Abbott's legacy.