Surreal Shadow Play: Exploring Maurice Tabard’s Photography on the Grand Scale

The influential ELT Mesens, an avant-garde artist and gallerist, played a vital role in promoting surrealism during the 1920s and 1930s in Paris, Brussels, and London. Mesens, a close friend of André Breton, Man Ray, and René Magritte, acted as a bridge between Belgian and French artists within the group. In June 1929, Mesens served as the art director for a special edition of the Belgian magazine Variétés. This edition featured essays by Sigmund Freud on jokes, as well as contributions by Louis Aragon, and illustrations and images by Magritte and Max Ernst.

Previously assumed lost, a significant collection of vintage prints from the Variétés archive was discovered 30 years ago in the Flemish daily newspaper Vooruit archive. These prints miraculously remained intact and showcased images from the pioneering surrealist photographers, such as Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, and László Moholy-Nagy.

Currently, there is an exhibition in Amsterdam displaying images from the recovered Variétés archive. One of the featured prints is from 1929, captured by the French photographer Maurice Tabard. Before returning to France, Tabard worked as a fashion photographer in New York during the early 1920s. He was also an assistant to Man Ray and contributed to the development of various techniques associated with the surrealist movement, such as solarisation, multiple exposures, and negative burning. These techniques aimed to introduce chance and free association into photographic practices.

The image on display depicts the element of surprise and accidental nature frequently found in collage art. The shadowy hand, reaching out for the daily newspaper, became a distinctive feature of surrealist imagery, often portrayed as operating independently from conscious thought—a strange and mysterious creative force with a revolutionary character of its own.