In 1965, the Swiss photographer Yves Debraine regularly went to New York on professional assignments. During one of his trips, he photographed in the mythical Chelsea Hotel, a group of artists who lived and worked there, including Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, also Daniel Spoerri, Larry Rivers, Arman and Claes Oldenburg. Most of the photographs were never published. Luc Debraine, his son, today a journalist, reveals this private world to us.
My father, Yves Debraine, was a photojournalist, born in Paris in 1925, he died in Lausanne in 2011. Today I manage his considerable archives, fortunately they are well organised. In 2010 I covered the Niki de Saint Phalle retrospective at the Centre Pompidou for the Swiss magazine, L’Hebdo.I remembered the photographs of the artist my father had taken in the 1960s in New York. He got them out for me straightaway. They were beautiful black and white prints. I published several of them in my article.
In 2016, the city of Fribourg commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of one of its most famous sons, the sculptor Jean Tinguely. The celebration’s organisers were looking for documents, especially photographs, of this creative sculptor and his creaking machines. So I dived into my father’s archives, finding many portraits and reportages on Tinguely, from the 1960s to the dawn of the 1990s. Pictures show Tinguely and Saint Phalle at work in the Chelsea Hotel in New York in March 1965, The photos published several years earlier in L’Hebdo were part of this series.
I found a dozen black and white negatives, dated March 1965. They showed the Chelsea Hotel, Tinguely at work in the Iolas gallery, the visitors to The Responsive Eye exhibition at MOMA. But also Manhattan plagued by snow squalls and sudden thunderstorms, the cops on night patrol, the editorial staff at Life magazine where Yves Debraine was working at the time, a meal where you can see, among others, Dimitri Kessel, an ex-soldier from the Red Army who had become one of the photographic pillars of Life. It was Dimitri Kessel who introduced Yves Debraine to the large-format camera, indispensable for the reproduction of paintings in the world’s great museums. These reproductions were used in the art books collections published by Time-Life.
At the beginning of the spring of 1965 in New York, my father was testing a new fish-eye lens, a Nikkor 7.5 mm. The rooms-studios-galleries were an ideal place to put this strange focal length to the test.
I was faced with an odd series. Its status floated between the visual essay, the photographic test, the unpublished documents on the legendary hotel’s creative effervescence. The artists present, mainly the Neo-realists, playing with the wide-angle lens, busied themselves, conversed in concert. Here were Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri, Arman, Christo et Jeanne-Claude, Larry Rivers and Claes Oldenburg. Not forgetting Stanley Bard, the fantastic director of the Chelsea Hotel, surrounded by works of art given by penniless artists to pay their hotel bills.
Little by little, in pursuing this research, the series took on extra weight. The spring of 1965 was a pivotal time for many of the artists. Their conquest of America. Niki de Saint Phalle created her first “Nanas”, Tinguely imposed his presence at the Alexandra Iolas gallery and the Jewish Museum, Christo and Jeanne-Claude settled in New York, Daniel Spoerri invited visitors to discover his “snare-pictures” in his hotel room. The essay, or the test, or the document was turning into a little piece of history. In the blink of an eye, from the fish-eye of the 1960s to the contemporary 360º lenses, accessories of the social networks, virtual reality and “immersive” technologies.
The photographs were not shown at all during the Tinguely commemoration in 2016. On the other hand, Caroline Schuster, assistant director of the Art and History Museum in Fribourg retained the series for an exhibition that opened on February 23rd in the Espace Jean Tinguely-Niki de Saint Phalle in the Swiss institution. I am the co-curator . A publication accompanies the exhibition. It has the appearance and format of the great magazines of the 1960s, out of respect for the work of the photographer of that time. He who didn’t take himself for an artist.
Luc Debraine
Luc Debraine is a journalist who writes about culture and society. He lives and works in Lausanne in Switzerland.
Chelsea Hotel New York 1965
From 23rd February to 2nd September 2018
Photographies d’Yves Debraine
Espace Jean Tinguely-Niki de Saint Phalle
Musée d’art et d’histoire
Rue de Morat 2
1700 Fribourg
Suisse
