Nadar - Softcover

Hambourg, Maria Morris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870997378 ISBN 13: 9780870997372

Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995

Synopsis

Nadar (1820-1910), whose real name was Felix Tournachon, was a conspicuous presence in 19th-century France. He invented himself over and over: as a bohemian writer, a journalist, a romantic utopian, a caricaturist, a portrait painter, a balloonist, a scientific innovator. It is for photography that Nadar is most remembered. In just a few years he taught himself the young art and became one of its greatest practitioners. His sitters, who were often his friends, included many of the great men and women of his time: Dumas, Rossini, Baudelaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Daumier, Berlioz, George Sands, and Delacroix. In this book, the catalogue for an exhibition at the Metroploitan Museum of Art in 1995, some 100 photographs from Nadar's finest period are reproduced and their subjects described. The roots and development of his photographic art and the many types of prints in which his images were disseminated, are also discussed.

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From Booklist

New York's Metropolitan Museum pulls out all the stops in this magnificent treatment of the life and work of Fe{‚}lix Tournachon, the photographer self-named, and famous as, Nadar. A lively, energetic, creative machine in mid-nineteenth-century France, Nadar was a bohemian journalist, a caricaturist, a photographer, and a promoter of balloon flight. Never a good businessman, he let his enthusiasms exhaust his means in every enterprise. Although he lived until 1910, his best photographic portraits were made in the mid-1850s. He photographed, in images that possess remarkable presence even today, the notable artistic and literary personalities of midcentury France's romantic and republican heyday, when his temperament was in its glory. In the second empire, he increasingly felt out of place, and in his final projects--photographing the catacombs and sewers of Paris and sights observed from the gondola of his balloon, Ge{‚}ant his alienation from the Paris he had loved was literal as well as symbolic. This profusely illustrated document provides a fascinating picture of French public life at midcentury while delineating one of its foremost personalities. Gretchen Garner

About this edition

• Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0870997378
• ISBN 13: 9780870997372
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 270