Photographs:
Artists & Performers
Auction: Thursday 3 December 2015 - 2.30 pm

On Thursday 3 December 2015, the PIASA Photography Department will stage a sale devoted to Studio Photography and to different approaches towards the theme of The Portrait – by a variety of artists ranging from Edmond Bénard and Erwin Olaf to Pierre Molinier and Yves Klein.

The sale will also include a major ensemble: the series Our Contemporaries at Home from the Dornac Collection. Between 1880-1910 Paul Marsan, better known as Dornac, took the portraits of leading artists and intellectuals of the day.

‘The amazing discovery of the Grotte Chauvet, and the incredible public enthusiasm that followed, reflects the contemporary fascination for Artists – even if these artists are our anonymous, long-gone ancestors. Alongside interest in the aesthetics, forms, colours and use of volumes, which render these primitive drawings so sublime, we also rediscover a way of life, a civilization, and a world studded with fears and hopes.

The various galleries inside the Grotte Chauvet constitute the premises of what artists’ studios would become: somewhere that reveals the artist’s thoughts and creativity, expressed at a given moment and in a specific cultural context.
The way of arranging pictures in the studio, positioning the easel as regards the light, the room’s (lack of) comfort, the accumulation (or, as with Picasso, the absence) of palettes, the position of the  model and of the work itself… all these things offer clues as to an artist’s approach. Edmond Bénard’s studio photographs perfectly reflect artistic life in the 19th century; Brassaï, for instance, was more interested in the narrow relationship between the artist and his work.

Models are inseparable from artists. They lend their forms, pose, the movement of their bodies (don’t we talk about body language?) and facial expressions to the painter’s or photographer’s creativity and imagination. Whether human or animal, models slip into the character of the interpreter to express whatever emotions, feelings or situations the artist imagines. So, in order to stress Yves Saint Laurent's intense creativity, Jean Marie Périer portrays him in his sitting room, amidst his favorite works of art, as a testimony of his wide and eclectic taste whereas, Erwin Olaf, intimately impressed by memories of a probable imaginary past, composes a monochrome work inspired by pictural form and composition which deals with poetry and oddness.
Eric Pillot, together with Ernest Goh are interested by the poses animals adopt in a universe which holds them prisoners. Last Weegee selects and portrays his models in a queer and humorous way. Agnès de Gouvion Saint-Cyr, Artistic director