Raoul Ubac “Penthésilée” (1938)

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La Penthésilée (1938) is so haunted and strange, a battle of the mythical Amazons *1. One gets lost on a journey of looking because it is challenging to sort through the layers of negatives, darkroom maneuvering with photomontage, solarization *2, rephotographing, and something called “brulage” a singeing of the negatives. The scene is terribly ominous with the onset of World War II.

The photographic paper takes on a three dimensional effect like an eroded stone frieze or an imagined memory. The violence is muted but dreadfully evident; it coruscates darkly in the viewers imagination. It’s all angles and curves and eccentric with familiar and isolated shapes.

If Ubac wished “a state of innocence which would reflect through the work the magnificence of the world.”*3, his ultimate report must have been pessimistic.

There was an exhibition in Paris of what appeared to be a complete series in 2000. It was like an exhilarating nightmare orchestrated by Christian Bouqueret (1950-2013), an inspired and inspiring champion of photography whose singular collection of 7000 works went to the Centre Pompidou after his death. He “felt that people were always being shown the same images and there was a whole range of photographers who deserved attention”.

I subscribe to that sentiment and his statement, “I don’t look for obviously attractive images; I believe that beauty unveils itself and that mystery is a part of it.”*4

*1 “To represent the queen and her consort, Ubac carefully lit and posed his wife, Agi, with a friend, and he solarized the resulting images to partially annihilate their forms. Ubac was deft with his darkroom manipulations: to create this image he progressed through four steps of montage, repeating solarizations on each of them in turn. He pieced in additional nudes and objects—different images of Agi and her friend brandishing staves, coils of rope, and stones—with extra shots of Agi’s curly hair. The work was then rephotographed and solarized during processing, then combined with other images in further iterations with still more elements in steps that are almost invisible in the finished image, though perceptible in the fine gradation of tones in the darkest passages”. Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delicti,” in Dawn Ades, Krauss, and Jane Livingston, Explosante-Fixe: Photographie et surréalism (Paris: Hazan, 1985), p. 70.

*2 Solarization is achieved by flipping on the lights momentarily in the darkroom potentially ruining the printing process but rather achieving a unique halo affect

*3 Source unknown

*4 Press release Gitterman Gallery, “Hommage à Christian Bouqueret”, Nov 16, 2016 – Jan 21, 2017

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