Études de Nu.

'Why make nudes? because it has always been beautiful and I liked it one summer morning'

Inscribed on half-title to the photographer Albert Citerne ‘bien amicalement, Germaine Krull.’ 24 heliogravure photographic prints after Germaine Krull. 8vo., 24x17cm, [8] + 24 plates. Original publisher’s orange cloth portfolio with white cloth spine and ties, upper cover with typographic paper label. Paris, Librairie des Art Décoratifs.

A striking and attractive copy in very good condition, the fragile orange of the covers remarkably bright with only the slightest of fading towards extremities, both ties present, very light spotting to text leaves, plates fine with occasional and very slight rubbing to corners.

‘Why make nudes?’ Germaine Krull asks in the introductory text to this collection: ‘because they have always been beautiful and I liked it one summer morning.’ At first glance, Krull’s portfolio of nude studies would seem to fulfil her rather flippant explanation, ‘after the astounding achievement of her first great portfolio Métal, which was at the forefront of radical modernism, one might argue that [it] constitutes a retrograde step’ (Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook). Although Études briefly flirts with modernist double exposures, the majority of Krull’s images are pictorialist in style, seemingly typical of contemporary depictions of the female body by both male and female photographers.

In the context of her earlier work, however, Études takes on more transgressive and innovative dimensions. Krull’s 1924 series of eleven photographs titled Les aimes, in which two partially clothed or nude women share embraces which move playfully between the classical and pornographic traditions, raises fascinating questions. In these images, taken in Berlin, the couple’s gaze and body language is invariably turned inward towards each other, away from the viewer. The erotic promise is not one of possession, but participation. ‘The campy and dramatic quality of the photographs demonstrates that Krull and her sitters were playing with the genre, in effect substituting an activist collaboration for the conventional male gaze controlling a docile nude… Her nudes represent women gazing on women, sometimes to mock male conventions and sometimes to touch on forbidden lesbian sexuality’ (Kim Sichel, Photographer of Modernity).

In Études, like Les aimes, one notices that the models’ gaze is in every case obscured, apart from one double exposure in which the model is shown from both behind and in front, staring not at the viewer but to the upper right of the frame. Krull’s previous experimentation with the nature of the gaze remains at play here, an observation reinforced by Cocteau’s introduction: ‘You look with your eyes. The same world, seen through different eyes, is not quite the same world…with a single click, the lens records the world outside and the photographer inside… the lens is a better eye than the eye.’ This comparison between the mechanical and the biological also raises fascinating questions in terms of the contrast between Krull’s Métal, one of the quintessential modernist photographic studies of the machine age, and the subtle ways in which her depictions of the female body have been similarly modernised - or not. ‘Critics have often likened these metallic bodies to the nude photographs she made around the same time. In both cases, Krull got close to her subjects, dislocating them from their environments…. Whether focused on a living subject or an architectural one, Krull’s camera resists the viewer’s urge to name and categorize.’ (Marina Molarsky-Beck, "Germaine Krull's Queer Vision")

‘Although on occasion she still seems bogged down in traditional representations of the nude, there is an evident empathy, an intimacy, with her sitters. As with the nudes of the American photographer Imogen Cunningham, this intimacy outweighs the formal, although Krull’s pictures are still somewhat reserved… the great fascination of Etudes de nu is in observing Krull’s struggle with the conventions of the nude genre, her own sensibilities, and the restrictions regarding the photographic nude that pertained even in Paris.’ (Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook)

Stock Code: 251652