Storefront, avenue des Gobelins

Eugène Atget, 1925

Download2939 × 4000 px View on a wall Edit

Artist: Eugène Atget (French, 1857–1927)
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Size: Image: 23 × 16.8 cm (9 1/16 × 6 5/8 in.)
Culture: French
Museum: J. Paul Getty Museum
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

Eugène Atget's vibrant study of this display of women's apparel, a tableau of a stylish, if frozen and partnerless, minuet being danced on the other side of a row of tightly furled umbrellas, is one of a series of at least four pictures that he made of the same clothing store. He moved his camera along the sidewalk so as to show each of the establishment's display windows.

This one exhibited garments for women; another, clothing for men; and a third, attire for children. The dramatic quality of this image derives from the exaggerated poses of the mannequins and the reflected silhouettes of the trees and the domed structure across the avenue des Gobelins. (Today, the building houses the museum of the Gobelins tapestry works.) This avenue still has emporia devoted to the sale of clothes.

The calculated interplay between what is seen through and reflected by the glass distinguishes Atget's later views of storefronts. Reflections in his earlier studies of shop windows were less precisely thought out (see, for example, 90.XM.64.20), but, by the time this picture was produced, Atget's long experience as a photographer had made him fully conscious of what his finished plate would show. The juxtapositions created by the mixture of internal and external elements transform the ordinary into the unexpected, a quality prized by the Surrealist artists, who discovered Atget's work at about this time (see also 90.XM.64.21).

Text: J. Paul Getty Trust, CC BY 4.0.