Didier Massard

I don’t know of a single, ready-made term that satisfactorily describes the art of Didier Massard. His beguiling photographs could be considered works of pictorialism, given their almost painterly style; and they are certainly tableau photographs, given their ‘staged’ execution—but the tableaux Massard constructs are, specifically, miniature ones: models. The only other photographer I’d heard of who worked in anything like a similar manner was Charles Matton, but in Matton’s work the miniatures take on lives of their own as self-contained objects, whereas Massard’s do not. Moreover, Matton’s photographs are all interior scenes, where Massard gives us landscapes…

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At first glance, Didier Massard’s photographs create a disturbing impression which we quickly realize has been achieved by means of photographic techniques. The photographs play on the ambiguity and confusion which takes hold of us as we try to establish the relationship between what we see and what actually existed. […] We want to believe and yet, cannot quite believe, that this “has really existed.” Explaining how the photographs were made would rob them of part of their mystery, that fine, taut defining line that links the apparent and the impossible—Christian Caujolle.

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My initial source for the first six of these pictures was a book simply entitled Images, which presented Massard’s œuvre as of 2002. While corresponding with the artist, however, he professed dissatisfaction with the quality of the reproductions in the book, and very kindly offered to send me copies of the works I’d intended to feature, also attaching another four more recent pieces. He writes that a new volume of his photographs, provisionally titled Artifices, is in preparation, to be published in November this year by Gourcuff-Gradenigo, Paris. Anyone intrigued by these photographs who happens to be in the Boston area next month, should check out the upcoming exhibition of Massard’s work at the Robert Klein Gallery, which is due to open on Sept. 7th.

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[Massard] was born and raised in Paris where he received his Baccalaureate degree in art and archaeology from the University of Paris in 1975. For twenty-five years he executed commercial work as a still photographer for clients in the world of fashion and cosmetics including Chanel, Hermes, and many others. After the completion of his series Imaginary Journeys, executed over almost ten years, his career was launched and he now works exclusively on his personal projects.

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His series are conceived from his imagination while drawing from our collective romantic and touristic notions of nationality and place. His exotic locales created in his studio have evoked Ireland, China, India, Holland and the cliffs of Normandy. Massard works for long periods on each of these tableaux, and ruminates that “each image is the completion of an inner imaginary journey.” Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times “color and space combine with fastidious detail to create a sense of illusion and artifice that is more usual to painting, Magic Realist painting in particular…one’s willingness to suspend disbelief is a measure of Massard’s skill.”

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While compiling this post, I have learned of other photographers besides Massard (and Matton) working with miniature tableaux: notably James Casebere, Edwin Zwakman, and Oliver Boberg. In an article about Boberg, I read that he seeks ‘to create unerring representations of the world without relinquishing the satisfaction of craftsmanship:’ a characterization that could similarly apply to Massard, provided we remember there is no way for us to inhabit the world he represents… For these sculptor-photographers, the craftsmanship is twofold, the construction of an image presupposes the construction of a model. In Massard’s case, both are done with the utmost attention to detail, but also with great imaginative flair. The present ten images are copyright © Didier Massard, and have been reproduced here with permission.

What I Did on my Summer Vacation

The house where we stayed on vacation the week before last was large enough that one room, on the ground floor, between the dining-room and the entrance-hall, was set aside as a bar. This room had tartan wallpaper and housed three striking taxidermical specimens: a deer’s head trophy; a large, stuffed bird-of-prey perched on the bar itself; and what appeared to be a genuine bear-skin rug. The taxidermy continued in an adjoining room, the one between the kitchen and the main lounge, where another trophy was on display, this time a boar’s head. More curious still was the ‘kitten shrine’ in the corner of an upstairs landing. Here, three stuffed kittens had been arrayed, a silent litter, on the floor in front of a mirror.

The house, we read, had originally been built in the seventeenth centuury. It was beautifully-decorated throughout: and some of the guest bedrooms had been deliberately ‘themed.’ For example, there was a ‘Venetian room,’ with carnival masks and framed, antique prints hanging on its deep red walls, and a vintage upright typewriter standing on the desk. Of the many eye-catching details, perhaps the most spectacular (barring the stuffed animals) was the powder-blue Vespa scooter posed in the main lounge. The gardens were suitably extensive, and there was a large outdoor swimming-pool—quite an extravagance at a latitude on the wrong side of 59° North—and also a full-size tennis-court.

While exploring the house on the day of our arrival, I found my way, past the first-floor guest bathroom, to a staircase at the opposite end of the house to the one where we had entered. Ascending this I was surprised to find myself in yet another suite of rooms, and further dismayed when a German lady approached me and introduced herself as the tenant of the house’s attic apartment, whose existence the house’s owner had neglected to mention to us. Embarrassed at having inadvertently wandered into someone else’s home, I made a quick exit, and later joked that I was reluctant to explore the basement, lest I should discover another family living down there…

Before the vacation, I’d had vague plans to set aside a day for some leisurely shopping in Stockholm, and to find time to check out the historic sights (and the bookstores) in Uppsala. And I was very keen to visit Skoklosters Slott, a nearby stately-home-turned-museum, where a certain painting was on display that I’d wanted to see. As it happened, I found myself more than content to spend most of my time lounging around the house or the pool with my wife and my mother & her boyfriend, and my sister & her husband and daughters, and our dog. And I made sure to spend a while swinging in the hammock suspended from two sturdy boughs of a horse-chestnut tree.

Anyone who wants to be further bored by my accounts of previous years’ vacations can find them here. I took the four photographs above, and five of those that follow below the fold. The shots of the horses, the dining-room, and the Vespa, were taken by my brother-in-law Mr. A____, and the last picture, of me in my Montecristi Fedora, was taken by my mother.

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More Odds and Ends

Artempo

Wildly eclectic and full of surprises, Artempo is the best show I have seen in years. I will direct you to Roberta Smith’s enthusiastic review of Artempo on the New York Times for more information. Let me just say that if you happen to be in Venice before October 7, 2007, I would forgive you for missing a rather unremarkable Biennale, but please do not overlook this gem.

Clockwise from top left:

• Anonymous (Thailand), Hand of Buddha, bronze, 15th–16th century
• Anonymous, ivory carving, 1640
• Louis Finson, The Four Elements, 1611
• Emilio Vedova, Tondo ’87-3, 1987

Brian Dettmer

In a recent Giornale comment thread we mentioned Tom Phillips’s A Humument. I was reminded of that work as I saw Brian Dettmer’s exquisite carved books at Urtopia, a group show curated by Kelly McCray at Toronto’s Edward Day Gallery. In a sense, these works are the opposite of collage. Using surgical tools, Brian Dettmer removes paper like an archeologist releasing a fossil from layers of sediment, thereby unveiling connections between words and images hundreds of pages away from each other. The results are breathtaking: solid and sculptural, with a texture resembling the wood from which the paper pulp once came.

The Vanishing City

I just found this page in a pile of old magazine clippings. It is a late seventies wordless comic by Tiger Tateishi. I believe Tiger is currently active as a Manga artist; at the time he painted this, he was working at the Ettore Sottsass architecture and design firm. The city being wiped away, Hiroshima-style, by the emptiness emanating from the homeless guy is unmistakably Milan, although I can’t quite place the neighbourhood. If anyone knows more of Tateishi’s works in this vein, I’d love to see them.

Van de Venne’s Album

At some time in the mid-eighteenth Century, John, the first Earl Spencer spent a hundred guineas on an album of a hundred and two paintings which he supposed to be the work of Peter Bruegel. Had he examined the album’s first folio closely, he might have noticed it was dated 1626, some fifty-seven years after Bruegel’s death. On the final folio, moreover, is an hour-glass motif with a signature traced in gold on its base which reads AV Venne fe. In 1978, the album was acquired by the British Museum, who, ten years later, published a book reproducing all of the album’s paintings. This volume (inelegantly titled Adriaen van de Venne’s Album in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum) has been my source for the images that follow. The information quoted and paraphrased here is likewise drawn from Martin Royalton-Kisch’s long and detailed introduction to this work.

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Adriaen van de Venne was born in Delft, in 1589. The one contemporary account of his life, Cornelius de Bie’s 1661 Het Gulden Cabinet, (‘The Golden Cabinet’) records that the painter’s parents were ‘estimable people and wealthy.’ The young van de Venne was taught drawing and illumination by a Lieden-based goldsmith named Simon de Valck, and went on to study with one Hieronymus van Diest, apparently ‘a very fine painter in black and white.’ Between 1614 and 1624, van de Venne lived and worked in the town of Middelburg, where he produced a number of fine, large-scale paintings, and where he began providing emblematic illustrations for the works of the poet Jacob Cats. During this period he also produced many independent prints, most of them topical satire or political propaganda.

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By 1625, van de Venne had moved to The Hague, where he lived until his death in 1662. Royalton-Kisch speculates that his initial reason for moving there was to complete commissions for the new stadholder Fredrik Hendrik, who had succeeded to the title following the death of Prince Maurits. Van de Venne worked until the 1650s as a prolific illustrator and painter of grisailles, works done only in shades of grey and brown. Most of his grisailles are coarsely-humorous genre scenes depicting ‘the folly of an ignorant peasantry.’ Van de Venne was active in the Guild of St. Luke at The Hague, being elected several times to positions of responsibility within it. Besides painting, he also wrote several volumes of poetry, his verses often as broadly humorous as his grisailles and as stoutly patriotic as his designs for visual propaganda.

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The origins of the album now in the British Museum are obscure. Royalton-Kisch guesses it to have been commissioned by the exiled Frederick V., the ‘Winter King’ of Bohemia. He and his uncle, the stadholder Fredrik Hendrik are both depicted several times in the album, with the former, in line with court etiquette, usually given precedence. Thematically, the album falls into roughly-equal halves, the first being concerned with political imagery (places of importance in the on-giong eighty-years’ war; depictions—both formal and informal—of the nobility, courtiers, professionals and soldiers; and allegorical scenes of various kinds). The album’s second half is mostly concerned with moralising scenes of peasant life, which, while often comical, are generally more sympathetic and wholesome than those sketched by van de Venne in his grisailles.

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The present images are as follows: (1) The King and Queen of Bohemia, where Frederick and his wife Elizabeth are shown on horseback, followed by Fredrik Hendrik and his wife, Amalia van Solms; (2) A Baron on horseback, accompanied by three boys; (3) A Game of Balloon: an apparently volleyball-like game; (4) A Game of Billiards where Fredrik Hendrik is about to strike a ball, encouraged by the Winter Queen; (5) An Old Poacher with a ‘necklace’ of dead rabbits; (6) Two Men Carrying a Barrel: where the barrel is to be understood as a symbol for Heidelberg, former seat of Frederick V. and Elizabeth, the burden of whose court was then borne by sturdy Dutchmen; (7) A Peasant Couple and a Dog on Tiptoe; and (8) A Peasant Pushing a Woman on a Sledge.