The avant-garde artist and gallerist ELT Mesens was crucial to the spread and promotion of surrealism in 1920s Paris and Brussels – and later in 1930s London. A friend of André Breton and Man Ray and “soulmate” of René Magritte, he was instrumental in (briefly) bringing together the rival Belgian and French artists in the group. The occasion for this was a special June 1929 edition of the Belgian magazine Variétés, for which Mesens was art director. The magazine featured essays by Sigmund Freud (on jokes) and Louis Aragon and illustrations and images by Magritte and Max Ernst.
It was thought that much of the original archive of Variétés had been lost, but 30 years ago, in the archive of the Flemish daily newspaper Vooruit, a large cache of vintage prints from the magazine was discovered, miraculously preserved. The magazine had featured images by all the pioneers of surrealist photography including Man Ray, Berenice Abbott and László Moholy-Nagy.
An exhibition of images from the Variétés archive is currently on display in Amsterdam. It includes this 1929 print by the French photographer Maurice Tabard, who had worked as a fashion photographer in New York in the early 1920s before returning home. Tabard was, for a time, Man Ray’s assistant and helped to pioneer many of the techniques that became associated with the movement – solarisation, multiple exposures, the burning of negatives, all of which were designed to bring chance and free association into photographic practice.
This picture references the surprises and accident of collage. The shadow hand, here reaching for the daily paper had, by then, become a signature of surrealist imagery, often appearing to operate autonomously, detached from brain and intent, a strange and uncanny creative force with a revolutionary mind of its own.
Variétés. Photography and the Avant-Garde is at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam until 22 October
