拍品專文
Dubreuil was one of the few European Pictorialists to be affected by artistic developments that were emerging in Paris upon his arrival in 1908. Made within the first year of his Paris stay, this composition prefigures some of the modernist developments of the 1920s - the use of a bird's eye view, skewed perspective and machine-age imagery. Mightiness was one of the key images of his Paris period and was one of the five Dubreuil images selected by Alfred Stieglitz for inclusion in the 1910 landmark International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at the Albright Gallery, Buffalo, there titled Steam, Gard du Nord. This image was also one of five prints sent to Stieglitz for his personal collection, but later apparently lost.
Anthony Guest, writing in The Amateur Photographer in 1912 commented: A big locomotive in a cloud of steam looks a mighty thing, as everyone will admit, but how is the sense of its impressive power to to be set forth pictorially in black and white? M. Dubreuil... leaves out details of construction and tone values, lest they detract from the spirit of the subject by calling attention to its material aspect. The engine becomes a great black mass...and its superabundant energy is expressed by the contrasting whiteness of the rushing steam, suggesting immaterial force.
Work from Dubreuil's Paris period is extremely rare, partly because he seldom made more than two prints of an image, and also because much of his work of this period was destroyed by fire during WWI. This print was recently exhibited in Beaumont Newhall's last curatorial effort- Proto Modern Photography at the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts.
This is the only known print of this image.
Anthony Guest, writing in The Amateur Photographer in 1912 commented: A big locomotive in a cloud of steam looks a mighty thing, as everyone will admit, but how is the sense of its impressive power to to be set forth pictorially in black and white? M. Dubreuil... leaves out details of construction and tone values, lest they detract from the spirit of the subject by calling attention to its material aspect. The engine becomes a great black mass...and its superabundant energy is expressed by the contrasting whiteness of the rushing steam, suggesting immaterial force.
Work from Dubreuil's Paris period is extremely rare, partly because he seldom made more than two prints of an image, and also because much of his work of this period was destroyed by fire during WWI. This print was recently exhibited in Beaumont Newhall's last curatorial effort- Proto Modern Photography at the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts.
This is the only known print of this image.