Pierre Dubreuil French, 1872-1944
A pioneering modernist photographer, Pierre Dubreuil was born into a wealthy mercantile family in Lille. He began his career as a pictorial photographer, joining the prestigious Photo-Club de Paris in 1896 and exhibiting his work in international salons. In 1903 he was elected to membership in the Linked Ring; seven years later his work was included in the important exhibition of pictorial photography organized by Alfred Stieglitz for the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo.
As did many other photographers of the time, Dubreuil experimented with various printing techniques, including platinum, gum bichromate, and the carbon process. However, around 1904 he came to favor oil-pigment printing, which offered freedom for manipulation, and soon mastered the process. From the latter part of the decade until World War I, Dubreuil began producing innovative images that embraced a modernist idiom, but continued to use the soft-focus technique favored by the pictorialists. He experimented with bird's-eye perspective and abstraction, and made pictures that emphasized the flat, two-dimensional nature of the photographic image. His photographs often upset the traditional ordering of objects by giving equal or greater prominence to those normally considered unimportant. During these years Dubreuil lived in Lille, except for two years spent in Paris (1908-10). In 1924 he moved to Belgium where he continued his innovative work, exploring fragmented images and the closeup.
Considered a leading innovator, Dubreuil was honored with a retrospective by London's Royal Photographic Society (1935). He returned to France during World War II, and after his death in 1944 his work was forgotten. Almost 40 years later, interest in Dubreuil was revived by Tom Jacobson, a San Diego photographer and collector of photography who sought out surviving examples of his photographs in Europe. Drawing upon these recently rediscovered images, an exhibition of Dubreuil's work was organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1988). M.M.
