Page 29 - Studio International - December 1971

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so Brothel, Versailles, August 1920
Female nude

the madam, is leaning casually on the balustrade Her hair is frizzled, her mouth seems painted bottom of the frame, at the top and overlaying
of the window above her (W123, A63). In askew, her nose (but this may be a distorting the mannequins are the hardly less solid-
another picture an elegantly dressed woman sits effect of the sunlight) looks as if it had been looking reflections of the sky, a tree, a street
meditatively on a chair in a corner of a slum broken and slightly flattened, a worn-looking front dominated by a neo-classical building; and
courtyard; heavy flagstones are under foot, the fox fur hangs round her neck, its strangely if two of the faces have the kind of slightly
doorway to her left in the grimy walls is black animated head resting on her forearm. This is suspect, smiling painted animation of early
and sinister, bars stand in front of the tiny the picture to which Atget gave the expressive 1920's movie heroes, the third, turned away
glimpse of sky in the extreme top left corner title 'Versailles'.32 from them, is sensitive, meditative, wholly
(W124, A62, C37). In a third, and one of Atget's Yet it is still the balancing of forces that must natural and individual. Again, in the corset
finest, the juxtaposition of elegance and the be insisted on. Miss Abbott seems to me quite picture a corset on a bust hanging in the doorway
tarnished is reversed again (see fig. 10). The fifteen right when she says that 'the material (animated associatively by a blurred garment
feet or so of windowless façade that occupies presentment of life so entranced [Atget] that he swinging free below it that in fact sets the key of
most of the frame consists of dark, massive, did not enter into satire or social criticism. He the whole picture) opens downwards like the
classical wooden panelling, with a portico over had a task large enough to re-create the whole bell of a strange flower, while empty corsets in a
the high central doorway; the curbstones and visual world of Paris in photographs.'33 And in row at the bottom of the window are spread out
cobblestones that occupy the rest of the frame his treatment of people Atget seems to me no like seaweed or polyps, and tightly folded ones
are massive too, the overall impression of more a social critic than was Rembrandt. Even in the window to the left of the doorway seem
strength in the things in the picture being where the pictures that I have described are strange abstract shapes carved in wood or
intensified by the sharp oblique sunlight concerned, there are other elements that must plaster. And in this strange world of
and a considerable lens distortion; and not be overlooked. In the picture of the metamorphoses, its strangeness intensified by
posed in the middle of the doorway is the only gentleman-mannequins, for instance, its the blackness out of which these forms emerge,
object with soft outlines, the slightly diffident peculiar richness and fascination derive from there is even a sort of dignity in the poised
figure of a prostitute in knee-high white dress the dominant sense of life in it. If there are solid central bust, while three tiny photographs of
and worn-looking boots over little-girl socks. and rather inhuman-looking trousers at the fashionable ladies in the window recall that the
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