Exhibition at the museum

Collages and Photomontages of Victorian England

From October 07th, 1997 to January 04th, 1998 -
Musée d'Orsay
Esplanade Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
75007 Paris
Map & itinerary

Georgiana Berkeley-Eventail avec onze portraits d'hommes, femmes et enfants
Georgiana Louisa Berkeley, Anonyme, Emma Sophia (Honorable) Douglas-Pennant
Eventail avec onze portraits d'hommes, femmes et enfants, entre 1866 et 1871
Musée d'Orsay
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
See the notice of the artwork
The Musée d'Orsay displayed an exhibition based around a photomontage album illustrated with water-colours and "papiers collés", acquired in 1997. This album, composed between 1868 and 1871 by Georgina Berkeley (1831-1919), a relative of George Byron, represents great aristocratic families: the Penrhyns, the Cavendishes, the Smith-Marriotts and Douglas Pennants.
Photography, limited in general to family portraits, is secondary to the general composition, fantastical and humorous. These albums are works of raw art, for use by good society.
Following the vein of fancy and the absurd, the exhibition also displayed humoristic postcards of the turn of the century, which Paul Eluard collected with passion, and which he defended in the periodical Le Minotaure in December 1933, as well as several collages (or publications issued from collages) made by Max Ernst and, lastly, a self-portrait by Raoul Haussmann. The latter, a dadaist artist, was influenced by the technique used by Georgiana Berkeley, but his source is to be found mainly in popular art. He told himself how in 1918 he discovered this process in a hamlet in the Baltic, observing in each house the portrait of a soldier, whose head, photographed and then cut out and placed on a wooden engraving, decorated a conventional barracks background. Instantly, he expressed his enthusiasm for this process, which allowed him to express his loathing of what he called "playing the part of the artist". He then invented the term "photomontage", making it possible for him to pose as an "engineer".
Max Ernst, from 1920 onwards, would use a similar technique, but Aragon, in a famous text written in 1923, would term it "collage".

The exhibition is now over.

See the whole program