Born: 1872, 5 March - France, Lille Died: 1944, 9 January - France, Grenoble Gender: Male Active: France
Early pictorialist who was elected to the Linked Ring (1903). He became interested in ‘Vorticist‘ and Abstract images.
Pierre Dubreuil (1872-1944)
Born into a wealthy mercantile family in Lille, Dubreuil was a "gentleman photographer" and a prominent figure in European Pictorialist circles at the turn of the century. He first exhibited his work at the Photo-Club de Paris in 1896, at various international salons and with the Linked Ring Brotherhood, to which he was elected 1903. In 1910 his work was included in the important exhibition of pictorial photography organized by Alfred Stieglitz for the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo.
While many of his fellow Pictorialists favoured pastoral or allegorical subjects, Dubreuil embraced the modern machine age. He is considered one of the early modernists, photographing the urban landscape from unexpected perspectives (birds eye) as well as making close-ups of the machine as an emblem of the modern era. An influential figure in the development of the "New Photography," he consistently emphasized design and idea rather than content. He experimented with a range of printing techniques (e.g. platinum, gum bichromate and the carbon process) but from 1904 he settled on Bromoil printing. His work often involved non-traditional compositional devices, giving greater importance to what might be considered the more mundane elements of the image. His work was considered to be influenced by Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism.
Dubreuil lived in Paris from 1908 to 1910 and after WWI he suffered terrible personal losses and moved to Belgium in 1924 where he continued his experimental photographic work exploring fragmented images and close-ups, but he returned to France before he died.
Sickness and poverty led him to sell his archives to Gevaert in 1943 although this lead to their loss when the factory was bombed during the war.
He became president of the Association Belge de Photographie in 1932 and his career culminated in 1935 when he was honoured with a retrospective at the Royal Photographic Society in London. After his death in 1944 his work was largely forgotten until 1988 when interest in Dubreuil was revived by Tom Jacobson, a San Diego photographer, collector and dealer who sought out surviving examples of his photographs in Europe. Drawing upon these rediscovered images, an exhibition of Dubreuil's work was organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1988).
(Courtesy of Brian Law, pers. email, 23 April 2012)
Genealogy of Pierre Dubreuil
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