VAL TELBERG
"An American Surrealist in Paris"

Exhibition: 12 September – 10 November 2024
Opening: Wednesday, 18 September, 6pm

Exhibition organized as part of the partnership between the CPGA, the Centre Pompidou and the Association André Breton.

2024 will mark the centenary of one of the most fascinating and influential artistic movements of the 20th century. A hundred years ago, indeed, André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto. The Centre Pompidou, which is preparing to celebrate this anniversary with a major exhibition, "Le Surréalisme d’abord et toujours"", has launched a call for projects - "A Surrealist Season in Paris" - to which Les Douches la Galerie has decided to respond.

This will be an opportunity for the public to (re)discover a unique experimental work, composed mainly of superimposed images of characters in motion that present a dreamlike weightlessness associated with surrealism. The works of Val Telberg, who also created paintings, sculptures, and films, are part of numerous international public collections, including that of the Centre Pompidou. Four of his photomontages were, in fact, exhibited during the collective exhibition "Corps à Corps – Histoire(s) de la photographie".

Curator: Françoise Morin

Val Telberg

Born to Finnish-Russian parents in Moscow on February 14, 1910, Vladimir Telberg von Teleheim, who signs his name as Val Telberg in his artistic work, was raised in northern China. He attended British, French, Japanese, and American schools in various Chinese cities, as well as in Japan and Korea. In 1928, he received a scholarship to attend Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio, where he earned a degree in chemistry in 1932. He immediately returned to China to engage in various activities, including book publishing and selling pharmaceutical products. The Second Sino-Japanese War prompted Val Telberg to return to the United States in 1938, settling in New York. Unable to enlist in the American army due to physical fitness, he moved to an isolated farm in New Jersey in 1941, where he spent an entire year painting, despite never having seriously considered becoming an artist.

In 1942, he began taking painting classes at the Art Students League of New York, where he was introduced to Surrealism and experimental cinema. To earn a living, he became an advertisement salesman, a restaurateur, and worked in a laboratory developing films for nightclub cameramen. In 1944, Val Telberg moved to Florida, where he met his future first wife, Kathleen Lambing (better known as Kathleen Haven).

His career as a photographer truly began upon his return to New York in 1945, in collaboration with his wife. Encouraged by Morris Kantor, his professor at the Art Students League, to explore new directions in photography, he bought his first enlarger and began developing combined images from multiple negatives. In 1948, the Brooklyn Museum of Art offered him the first retrospective of his photomontages, and his talent was showcased in the major historical exhibition organized by Edward Steichen at the MoMA, "In and Out of Focus: A Survey of Today’s Photography".

In 1949, he left for Europe, where he experimented with 16mm film editing at Oxford University. He also lived for some time in Paris. In 1952, he returned to New York and illustrated Anaïs Nin’s "House of Incest". In 1966, Val Telberg began working on large-scale, scroll-like photographs with multiple images. Two years later, he moved to Long Island, where for nearly a decade, he created non-objective cement sculptures and avant-garde multimedia productions with his second wife, the dancer Lelia Katayen. Val Telberg’s works are part of numerous American public collections, including those of the MoMA, the MET, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Getty Museum and LACMA in Los Angeles, and the SF MoMA in San Francisco, which dedicated a retrospective to him in 1983. Les Douches la Galerie has showcased his photos in three group exhibitions between 2014 and 2022, while the Centre Pompidou recently acquired four of his works and displayed them in the exhibition Corps à Corps – Histoire(s) de la photographie, which took place from September 2023 to March 2024.

Val Telberg passed away in April 1995, at the age of 85, in Southampton, New York.