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Contenidos disponibles en español y en inglés - Availables resources in spanish and english - Compilador / Compiler: Jorge Tobías Colombo
. Biography
(English)
Hombre de alma bohemia y
emprendedora, Nadar gozó de un gran renombre en el París
decimonónico de los tiempos de Napoleón III, pero alcanzó la
cima de su fecunda carrera como fotógrafo en las décadas de los
60 y 70.
En la Fototeca
del Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, extraviadas entre las
numerosas fotos de familias cubanas que allí se atesoran, se
descubrieron retratos originales tomados por el célebre fotógrafo
Nadar a tres personalidades de la cultura europea: el compositor
italiano Joaquín A. Rossini, la novelista
George Sand y el
poeta Alfonso Lamartine, estos dos últimos de origen francés al
igual que Nadar.
Acosado por las
dificultades económicas, se vio obligado a abandonar tempranamente
la profesión de periodista. Un escritor amigo, Eugène Chavett, lo
entusiasma entonces a comprar una cámara oscura. Así comienza en
1850 a incursionar en el retrato fotográfico con un éxito que ni él
mismo imaginaba. Retrató a los personajes más famosos de su época,
muchos de ellos pertenecientes a su círculo amistoso o con quienes
compartía una identidad espiritual común. Su fin era usar las
imágenes para una colección de caricaturas que publicaría con el
título de Pantheon Nadar, y de las que hizo una primera
tirada en 1854. Mickiewicz,
Lamartine, Bakunin,
Sarah Bernardt... fueron registradas por el lente del experimentado
fotógrafo, quien supo como nadie imprimir en sus retratos la genuina
cualidad físico-psíquica de sus prominentes modelos. los tres que se
hallaron entremezclados con fotografías de parientes en el viejo
álbum de una familia cubana, conservado en el Museo de la Ciudad. Roger Arrazcaeta - Director del Gabinete de Arqueología - Tomado de Opus Habana, Vol. II, No. 4, 1998, pp.44-45. |
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Biografía 2 -
Nadar en la bohemia
-
Marcelo Somarriva
- 141106 Nadar volvió a ser pobre y volvió a su oficio más pedestre de fotógrafo de estudio y a retratar a la interminable fila de arribistas. Pero esta vez no tuvo escrúpulos para satisfacerlos con retoques y otras gentilezas. El estudio adquirió dimensiones industriales, pero el maestro siguió ligado a las nuevas tendencias. En 1874, en una parte de su estudio se presentó la primera exposición impresionista, y un año antes de su muerte en 1910, le envió un telegrama de saludo al piloto Louis Blériot que había cruzado el Canal de la Mancha. Cuando Nadar tomaba sus fotos estaba plenamente consciente de ser un artista. Para él la foto era sólo un medio. No imitaba a la pintura; sólo hacía retratos.
Daumier
hizo una caricatura muy
cómica de Nadar tomando fotos desde su globo sobre
París. Al pie del dibujo se lee la frase
"Nadar elevando la
fotografía al nivel del arte",
y la caricatura está llena de sutiles ironías. Daumier
se burla de los objetivos artísticos y las fanfarronadas aerostáticas de
su amigo fotógrafo. París es un hormiguero de estudios de fotógrafos y
el canastillo del globo de Nadar lleva impresa la firma
del artista, la misma que puede verse escrita con mano temblorosa en
algunas de sus fotos y que adornaba con un destello de luz de gas las
ventanas de su estudio. A consultar: Biography - Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Ringmaster, publicist, and performer in a highly theatrical life, the legendary Nadar wore many hats—those of journalist, bohemian, left-wing agitator, playwright, caricaturist, and aeronaut. He had success in all these roles, but what he did best was collect a pantheon of friends whom he honored with his generous and perceptive photographic portraits. Born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon in 1820, the son of a liberal publisher, Nadar grew up in Paris in the heady ferment of Romanticism. Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Eugène Delacroix were his early heroes; Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, and Charles Baudelaire his maturing friends. Nadar's imagination, wit, and spontaneity, like his passion for the colorful, unconventional, and free, were tendencies shared with both generations of Romantic writers and artists. That these qualities are also natural to youth is appropriate, for the epoch was modernity's first act, a time when self-expression was a principled achievement and a serious artist could construct an identity on an adolescent nickname blazoned like a banner. Early in 1854, a banker friend proposed backing Nadar in a portrait photography business. Photography was just then perceived to be a lucrative affair; the new collodion-on-glass negatives produced portraits as sharp as daguerreotypes, but more easily and in multiple copies. Overcommitted to his activities as a caricaturist, Nadar persuaded his younger brother Adrien Tournachon—a lackluster portrait painter frequently on his dole—to be the principal operator. After paying for his photography lessons with Gustave Le Gray, Nadar was brushed off by Adrien, who opened the studio alone. Pushing Adrien into photography, however, had piqued Nadar's own interest in the camera—initially, perhaps, as a rapid sketching tool for caricatures. He installed a darkroom in his garden apartment at 113 rue Saint-Lazare, and tried out the new technique on friends who came to visit. Meanwhile, Adrien, lax and disorganized, was floundering. In September 1854, he convinced Nadar, recently married and over his ears in debt, to help save his business on the boulevard. "I gave it everything I could," Nadar wrote, "work, money [6,000 francs of his wife's dowry], personal relations, and my pseudonyum, which followed me." Nadar transformed Adrien's languishing studio overnight, and his bustling activity dominated the business until January 16, 1855, when the brothers quarreled and split. Adrien insisted on continuing to call himself Nadar jeune (Nadar the Younger), while Nadar maintained that his name, which he had made famous, was his alone to use. After more than a year of vain negotiations to reclaim exclusive rights to his moniker, Nadar finally took Adrien to court. The suit and the rivalry it cloaked dragged on for three years, until 1859, during which time Nadar made his finest portraits, always working at home in a relaxed and personal manner, and exclusively with friends or celebrities—of his aesthetic and political persuasion, of course—whom he invited to the rue Saint-Lazare studio. The sympathetic quality of Nadar's attention, his seductive energy, his jokes and stories, all served his photography, which he understood to be a private theater of personality, a stage for intimate, extemporaneous, collaborative performances between himself and his trusted companions. In preparing his suit against his brother, Nadar explained why he was a master of this subtle intuitive art. "What can [not] be learned ... is the moral intelligence of your subject; it's the swift tact that puts you in communion with the model, makes you size him up, grasp his habits and ideas in accordance with his character, and allows you to render, not an indifferent plastic reproduction that could be made by the lowliest laboratory worker, commonplace and accidental, but the resemblance that is most familiar and most favorable, the intimate resemblance. It's the psychological side of photography—the word doesn't seem overly ambitious to me." Meanwhile, Adrien blustered and faltered. When Nadar won the last appeal in June 1859, his younger brother was no longer even the semblance of a threat. Always unstable, but now demoralized and bankrupt as well, Adrien lived on Nadar's charity and in his shadow for the rest of his fruitless life. In 1860, Nadar moved from his cozy garden apartment and studio to a huge atelier in the building his friends Gustave Le Gray and the Bisson brothers had just vacated at 35 Boulevard des Capucines. The rent was astronomical and the lavish reconstruction ruinous, but Nadar's expenditures bought the triumph of his name—a gigantic signature scrawled on the glass facade of his palace and in the consciousness of the public. Now the
preeminent portrait emporium in Paris, Nadar's atelier attracted the
bourgeois clientele of the boulevard. But with rare exceptions, as when
George Sand or Sarah Bernhardt came for a sitting, Nadar left the
operation to the staff, and eventually to his son Paul. He had already
portrayed what was notable in his epoch and now shifted to a pursuit of
the future. He photographed underground with artificial light,
encouraged the development of aerial navigation, and flew the biggest
balloon ever built, the Géant. After more or less retiring in
1873, and until his death in 1910, Nadar recycled his continuing
passions and past escapades in several volumes of picturesque memoirs. Profile: Nadar In many ways Nadar (Gaspard Mix Tournachon) typifies the best qualities of the bohemian circle of writers and artists that settled in Paris during the Second Empire. Born into a family of printer tradespeople of radical leanings, young Nadar became interested in many of the era's most daring ideas in politics, literature, and science. After an ordinary middle-class education and a brief stab at medical school, he turned to journalism, first writing theater reviews and then literary pieces. Although a career in literature seemed assured, he gave up writing in 1848 to enlist in a movement to free Poland from foreign oppressors, an adventure that ended suddenly when he was captured and returned to Paris. There followed a period of involvement with graphic journalism, during which he created cartoons and caricatures of well-known political and cultural figures for the satirical press. This culminated in the Pantheon Nadar, a lithographic depiction of some 300 members of the French intelligentsia. Only mildly successful financially, it made Nadar an immediate celebrity; more important, it introduced him to photography, from which he had drawn some of the portraits. In 1853, Nadar set up his brother Adrian as a photographer and took lessons himself, apparently with the intention of joining him in the enterprise. However, despite the evident sensitivity of Adrian's portrait of the sculptor Emile Blavier his lack of discipline is believed to have caused Nadar to open a studio on his own, moving eventually to the Boulevard des Capucines, the center of the entertainment district. He continued his bohemian life, filling the studio with curiosities and objets d'art and entertaining personalities in the arts and literature, but despite this flamboyant personal style he remained a serious artist, intent on creating images that were both life-enhancing and discerning. Ever open to new ideas and discoveries, Nadar was the first in France to make photographs underground with artificial light and the first to photograph Paris from the basket of an ascendant balloon. Even though a proponent of heavier-than-air traveling devices, he financed the construction of Le Giant, a balloon that met with an unfortunate accident on its second trip. Nonetheless, he was instrumental in setting up the balloon postal service that made it possible for the French government to communicate with those in Paris during the German blockade in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Ruined financially by this brief but
devastating conflict, Nadar continued to write and photograph, running
an establishment with his son Paul that turned out slick commercial work.
Always a rebel, at one point he lent the photo studio to a group of
painters who wished to bypass the Salon in order to exhibit their work,
thus making possible the first exhibition of the
Impressionists
in April, 1874. Although he was to operate still another studio in
Marseilles during the 1880s and '90s Nadar's last photographic idea of
significance was a series of exposures made by his son in 1886 as he
interviewed chemist Eugene Chevreul on his 100th birthday, thus
foreshadowing the direction that picture journalism was to take. During
his last years he continued to think of himself as "a daredevil, always
on the lookout for currents to swim against." At his death, just before
the age of ninety, he had outlived all those he had satirized in the
famous Pantheon, which had started him in photography.
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