Alexandre & Dubreuil
IMAGE BROKER OR ARTIST
The careers of the French photographers Alexandre (1855-1925) and Pierre Dubreuil (1872-1944) span the period from the initial phase of Belgian Pictorialism up to the subsequent development of straight photography in the 1910s, a movement in international Pictorialism pioneered by Alfred Stieglitz in the USA. This shift marked a quest to capture the true essence of photography, moving away from the artistic manipulations that defined earlier pictorial styles. Despite their shared involvement in the evolution of photography, both men had very different approaches to their photographic art, and their legacies met with different fates accordingly.
Held in the collections of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, the following images and the careers of their authors allow us to revisit the aesthetic and social stakes of 19th-century photography.
Alexandre (Albert-Édouard Drains) probably took his father’s Christian name as a pseudonym. He was a professional photographer, and member of the Association belge de photographie (ABP) as of 1886. In 1888 Alexandre already had a solo exhibition at the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire in Brussels. He was a prominent member of the Brussels bourgeoisie, and he had been running a professional photographer’s studio with his mother in the popular Marolles quarter since at least 1881. He opened a new studio in a posh uptown part of the city in 1897. He took photographs of a variety of subjects and in several photographic styles. This opened up very different opportunities for him.
An appointment as the official photographer of the Belgian royal family illustrates his prominence in the capital’s bourgeois circles. He was an accomplished portrait photographer but was also involved in the promotion of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State through photographic exhibitions and large-scale projections of photographs taken by the King’s colonial agents. One of these events was in honour of Henry Morton Stanley, the King’s chief agent, returning to Brussels in 1890. These activities may well have made Alexandre the ideal candidate to become the cinematographer of the International Exhibition of Brussels in 1897. His cooperation with L’Optique belge, the Brussels subsidiary of the French company L’Optique, may have made him the first Belgian cinematographer ever.
He produced a substantial number of photographs between 1880 and 1897, both professional commissions and artistic photographs with which he participated in exhibitions in Belgium and abroad. Alexandre was also connected to the Brussels artists association L’Essor and created works of art together with the symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) in a mixed technique involving photography, pastels and chalk. As a notable professional member of the ABP Alexandre was favourably disposed to the emerging amateur pictorialist movement, and together with his fellow member, Hector Colard, he organised an exhibition of English pictorialist photographers at the Cercle Artistique et littéraire in 1892. Next to his ABP membership as a professional photographer, Alexandre was a protector-member of the amateur pictorialist group L’Effort.
Alexandre is cited as a prominent pictorialist at the 1899 Berlin Exhibition of Art Photography, in which he participated with several photographs. The fifth issue of 1903 of Art in Photography, an authoritative German journal on pictorialist photography, puts Alexandre in a category of his own, with nine of his photographs, and he is mentioned with his The Anatomy Lesson in the second issue of 1905. This is illustrative of the impasse Pictorialism was getting into. The photograph was already made before January 1888, at which time it was shown in the Cercle Artistique in Brussels. It could hardly be considered as a prime example of contemporary photography in 1905. In early pictorialist fashion, The Anatomy Lesson mimics painting. It clearly refers to Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632). It also demonstrates his use of the magnesium lightning, an early nineteenth century flash device which could be ignited simultaneously with the opening of the camera’s shutter.
Most of his work after 1897 is inspired by the naturalist and impressionist tendencies of French pictorialism. In 1907, two years after The Anatomy Lesson appeared in Art in Photography, Alexandre ceased to participate regularly in exhibitions. Although he used techniques which were innovative in his day, such as magnesium lighting and photographic enlargement, his artistic activity was limited in time, as he was increasingly focusing on commercial photography after he opened his studio in 1897. He continued in his capacity as royal photographer but closed his business in 1914.
Pierre Dubreuil was born in Lille in a bourgeois family. This gave him the leisure to be active as a pictorialist photographer at an early age. The New School of American Photography which exhibited for the first time in Europe in 1901 had a profound formative effect on Dubreuil. Although his French fellow-pictorialists were critical of his very personal style, he was elected as a member of the famous English pictorialist group The Linked Ring in 1903. Among his fellow members were several Americans, such as Alfred Stieglitz, whom Dubreuil greatly admired. In 1910 and 1912 Dubreuil contacted Stieglitz to have his work published in Camera Work, the magazine of the Photo-Secession, an American group of photographers of which Stieglitz was a prominent founding member. But his pictures were never published in the magazine.
By the time Pictorialism petered out in Europe, Pierre Dubreuil was looking for a more modernist way of making images, inspired by the historical avant-garde’s artists. An emblematic photograph in that respect is his The Boulevards (1909). In this photograph Dubreuil depicts modernity invading the fading nineteenth century. It combines a sharply focused closeup of a taximeter, with a blurred image of horse drawn carriages and pedestrians on a Parisian boulevard in front of the taxi. Around 1911, he explicitly refers to Cubism in his Interpretation Picasso: The Railway, in which he superposes the blurred tilted image of a steam locomotive at full speed with semi-transparent, sharply delineated rectangles, imitating the contemporary fragmented paintings of Picasso and Braque.
Turning his back on French pictorialism, he exploited every technical possibility of his camera and produced crisp, original pictures with unexpected angles and an intricate play of sharp and soft focus. Some critics recognised the importance of his modernist stance. Yet, when he exhibited some of his photographs in London in 1910, he still met with negative criticism.
In 1923 Pierre Dubreuil moved to Brussels and became a member of the ABP. In Brussels he devoted most of his time to pursue his photographic art and reinventing it. During the interbellum his work may have been influenced by his contacts with James Ensor and with Belgian Surrealists. Since no supporting archival documentation survives, this influence is somewhat hypothetical, and the references are more formal than substantial. Some of his photographs may also be indebted to the avant-garde cinema of Charles De Keukeleire and Fernand Léger.
In 1932 Dubreuil’s talent was recognised by his Belgian peers, and he became President of the ABP. He represented the modernist trend, as opposed to the more traditional approach of his fellow member and renowned Belgian pictorialist pioneer Léonard Misonne (1870-1943). Dubreuil’s international fame was now such that the Royal Photographic Society in London staged a retrospective exhibition of his work in 1935. The journal’s Pictorial supplement showed four pictures by Dubreuil, all of which testified to his modernist affinities.
During the Second World War all his photographs and his archives were destroyed. The American collector and dealer Tom Jacobson recovered some of the glass negatives in various archives and staged a first exhibition in Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1987. The exhibition travelled to San Diego, Detroit and New York in 1988. Jacobson gifted 92 modern prints to the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, where an exhibition and a conference on Dubreuil took place in 2022-2023.
An important element in Dubreuil’s work is the notion of “idea pictures”. He was more interested in the composition of his picture and in the idea behind it, than in its purely aesthetic features: playing with forms, suggestive juxtapositions, odd angles, multiplication of everyday objects crammed in the frame of the picture, poetic titles suggesting a solution to the puzzling image. As Dubreuil himself admonished the members of The Amateur Photographer in Antwerp in 1930: “Forget about the tool, just think about the spirit”. All this puts him far closer to the Surrealists than to the Pictorialists, of whom, it must be said, he apparently never explicitly distanced himself.