Pierre Jahan French, 1909-2003
Portrait d'un ange , ca 1943
Photography
31,5 x 23,5 cm
Epreuve tirée par l'artiste
Jahan photographed statues during the Occupation of Paris - which untimately led to his famous collaboration with Jean Cocteau for "La Mort et les statues", published just after the war. The angel becomes a particular theme in Jahan. An euphonic anagram of Jahan, the angel becomes a figure of inspiration, love, and death.
Portrait d'un ange, shot during the Occupation, features a blind, handless statue in precarious disequilibrium. There is a sense of profanation, between Christian and pagan mysticism - the angel is fallen, Oedipus gouges his eyes out. It is impossible not to read into this image the horrors of the century. But these mythomanias do not only come from a historical and biographical reading. They are also shared by the art of the early twentieth century: the statues set out in Chirico's empty squares, between metaphysics and neoclassicism of the return to order.
Portrait d'un ange, shot during the Occupation, features a blind, handless statue in precarious disequilibrium. There is a sense of profanation, between Christian and pagan mysticism - the angel is fallen, Oedipus gouges his eyes out. It is impossible not to read into this image the horrors of the century. But these mythomanias do not only come from a historical and biographical reading. They are also shared by the art of the early twentieth century: the statues set out in Chirico's empty squares, between metaphysics and neoclassicism of the return to order.
Jahan photographed statues during the Occupation of Paris - which untimately led to his famous collaboration with Jean Cocteau for "La Mort et les statues", published just after the war. The angel becomes a particular theme in Jahan. An euphonic anagram of Jahan, the angel becomes a figure of inspiration, love, and death.
Portrait d'un ange, shot during the Occupation, features a blind, handless statue in precarious disequilibrium. There is a sense of profanation, between Christian and pagan mysticism - the angel is fallen, Oedipus gouges his eyes out. It is impossible not to read into this image the horrors of the century. But these mythomanias do not only come from a historical and biographical reading. They are also shared by the art of the early twentieth century: the statues set out in Chirico's empty squares, between metaphysics and neoclassicism of the return to order.
Portrait d'un ange, shot during the Occupation, features a blind, handless statue in precarious disequilibrium. There is a sense of profanation, between Christian and pagan mysticism - the angel is fallen, Oedipus gouges his eyes out. It is impossible not to read into this image the horrors of the century. But these mythomanias do not only come from a historical and biographical reading. They are also shared by the art of the early twentieth century: the statues set out in Chirico's empty squares, between metaphysics and neoclassicism of the return to order.
Provenance
Fonds Pierre Jahan, through successionExpositions
2010 : Pierre Jahan. Libre cours, Musée Réattu, Arles (rétrospective).
2023 : Pierre Jahan. La fantaisie surréaliste, Galerie Jean-François Cazeau, Paris.
Literature
2010 : Pierre Jahan. Libre cours, Musée Réattu, Arles (rétrospective).
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