The Académie de Peinture de la Grande Chaumière, the cafés Le Dôme, La Rotonde, and La Coupole, artists’ ateliers where nude models used to pose, Boulevard Edgar Quinet and its jazz clubs: it was right here, at the very heart of Montparnasse that Émile Savitry (1903–1967) began his career as a painter, developed his photography practice, and spent time with his sculptors, painters, poets, and musicians friends.
Savory’s work brings back “the hot times of Montparnasse,” where artistic and amicable fermentation was taking place in smoky café parlors at the corner of Vavin and Montparnasse. One could run into Alberto Giacometti, Victor Brauner, Anton Prinner, whom Savitry photographed in the privacy of their ateliers, Samuel Granowski, whom he captured at the bar in La Rotonde, as well as Pablo Neruda and Paul Grimault, having a drink at La Coupole…
In 1929, Savitry exhibited his paintings at the Zborowski gallery which focused on the École de Paris. He met with enormous success, which terrified him and sent him flying off to the Pacific islands. Upon his return, he met Django Reinhardt in the Toulon harbor. He offered his hospitality to this as-yet-unknown gypsy guitarist and introduced him to the music of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.
The present exhibition, on display at the Musée Mendjisky-Écoles until October 5th, 2016, reflects the Parisian atmosphere of the 1930s through the 1950s, focusing on the career of a photographer with close ties to the Surrealists, the October group, and the Prévert brothers. A strong beam of light hits a masked face; ordinary people from the Pigalle neighborhood cross paths with the jazzy youths from the clubs in Saint-Germain-des-Près ; the streets of the capital started to look like movie sets. This black-and-white cinema was brought to life by Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert, whom Savitry accompanied on their film shoots. He conjured up the “dazzling light” of Portes de la nuit (Gates of the Night, 1946) and the melancholy beauty of Anouk Aimée in La Fleur de l’âge, an accursed film left unfinished, shot in Belle-Île-en-Mer in 1947, which Savitry documented for three months.
From these photographs emanate a poetic realism which Savory shared with Brass and Willy Ronis, as well as Robert Doisneau with whom he worked at the Rapho photo agency. With each silhouette of a shapely nude they remind us that the photographer had never abandoned the subjects dear to the painter he never ceased to be. The exhibition ends on a playful note with Charlie Chaplin leaping in mid-air and with Yves Joly’s hand-puppets — an elegant and light-hearted homage to this discreet man who was “too alive to want to be an artist,” as Claude Roy once put it.
Sophie Malexis – Curator
Émile Savitry, A Montparnasse Photographer
Through October 5th, 2016
Musée Mendjisky-Écoles de Paris
15 Square Vergennes
75015 Paris
France
