The Académie de la Grande Chaumière, cafés like Le Dôme, La Rotonde, and La Coupole, artists’ studios where nude models used to pose, Boulevard Edgar Quinet and jazz clubs: this was the heart of Montparnasse where Émile Savory began his painting career, started as photographer, and frequented his sculptors, painters, poets and musicians friends. It was there that this talented jack-of-all-trades who “had many strings to his bow ” lived his entire life.
His work revived “the hot hours of Montparnasse”, this artistic, friendly hotspot rooted in the smoky atmosphere of the cafés of the Vavin crossroads. There, one could see Alberto Giacometti, Victor Brauner and Antoine Prinner who Savitry photographed in the intimacy of their studios; Samuel Granowski, captured at the bar of La Rotonde; Pablo Neruda, returning from Spain after the French victory, here he was photographed at La Coupole with Paul Grimault and some Latin-American friends, mourning the Spanish Republic which he had always supported.
It was after his return from the Pacific Islands (where he had fled, frightened from a success too quickly acquired during his first painting exhibition at Galerie Zborowski in 1929) that he met Django Reinhardt at the port of Toulon. He offered room and board to the still unknown gypsy guitarist and introduced him to the music of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. The Reinhardt family soon joined Savitry in Paris and took refuge from time to time in the photographer’s beautiful apartment on Boulevard Edgar Quinet, made evident in a few touching photographs.
This exhibition reflects the atmosphere of Paris between the 1930s and 1950s and the journey of a photographer close to surrealists, the October Group and the Prévert brothers. Heavy lights illuminate masked faces, the common people of Pigalle cross the jazzy youth from the cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Près, and the streets of the capital seem like they came out of a film. This black and white cinema was glorified by Marcel Carné and Jaques Prévert who Savitry accompanied to filmings, bringing out the “dazzling light” of the Gates of the Night and the melancholic beauty of Anouk Aimée in The Flower of the Age, an ill-fated and unfinished film, filmed at Belle-Ile-en-Mer in 1947. To this day, Savitry’s photographs are the film’s only visual testimony, the reels having mysteriously disappeared.
The exhibition immerses us in this poetic realism that Savitry shared with Brassaï, Willy Ronis and Robert Doisneau with whom he teamed up at the Rapho agency. It reminds us with each silhouette of a nude’s harmonious curves that the photographer never abandoned the themes dear to the painter . It ends on a playful note, with the flight of Charlie Chaplin and the puppets of Yves Joly, a light and elegant bow to a quiet man who was, as Claude Roy wrote, was “too alive to want to be an artist.”
Sophie Malexis, curator
EXHIBITION
Emile Savitry, A Photographer from Montparnasse
From March 5th to April 24th, 2016
Espace Exposition Cour des Boecklin
17 rue Nationale
67800 Bischheim
France
Tuesday, Wednesday, Sunday 2pm – 6pm
Saturday 10am-12pm | 2pm-6pm
http://www.ville-bischheim.fr
http://www.emilesavitry.fr
