Robert Doisneau's legendary Hotel De Ville photograph of a couple engaged in a passionate kiss while standing in front of the famous Paris hotel is one of the first images to come to mind when an exhibition of photos from France during the mid-1900s is announced. Romantic it may be, but just how accurately or adequately it describes Parisian culture at the time is debatable.
Willy Maywald's portraits, on in contrast, convey little about the physical landscape of the city in which they were taken, but say a lot about the creative milieu that was Paris during the first half of the 20th century. A selection of Maywald's black-and-white photographs, focusing on renowned France artists and entertainers from 1934 to 1984 is currently making a brief stop at the FNAC photo gallery in Asia World Plaza this month. And for a glimpse inside the lives of France's cultural elite, it is well worth a look.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF FNAC:
Viewed as the cultural capital of the Western world during both the 19th and 20th centuries, Paris was a leader in artistic innovation. The number of movements that emerged in and around the city, including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Cubism and Surrealism, best illustrates its creative environment. In addition to its own well-respected artistic community, was a steady migration of literary giants and artists including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Jean Miro and Pablo Picasso among others.
Born and raised in Germany, in 1931 Maywald himself emigrated, where he studied photography and opened his own studio a few years later. It was there he befriended members of the local and foreign artist community, many of whom would later become the subjects of his own artistic endeavors.
Perusing the gallery, one is treated to a series of both French and expatriate artists among Maywald's collection of 36 photos, including Dutch painter Karel Appel, English sculpture Henry Moore, French performer Juliette Greco and mime Marcel Marceau.
Maywald draws on his subjects' profession to fill the frame making it possible to assume Sacha Guitry is an actor or Jacques Prevent is a poet by their facial expressions, before ever reading the title. At times a person slips out of focus as his or her work moves into the foreground to become the subject of the picture. Such is the case with Henri Heraut, who was photographed while working on a painting positioned behind a large shrine-like tomb, or Fernand Leger, who is dwarfed almost to the point of blending into one of his own large paintings.
There is definitely a feeling that Maywald knew his subjects well from the way he captures them on film. If there is any criticism of the exhibition it is that as a viewer you too wish to be more acquainted with the people in the pictures. Unfortunately other than a name, date and place where the photos were taken, there is no other description of the portrait available. While a brief history of the subject along with some details about the photo would be much appreciated, the photos themselves read like biographies.
Exhibition information:
What: Willy Maywald Portraits 1936/1984
Where: FNAC Photo Gallery (法雅客環雅店) in Taipei Asia World Department store located at B1, 337, Nanjing East Road, Sec 3, Taipei (台北市南京東路三段337號B1).
Telephone (02) 8712 0331.
When: Until Sept. 9 daily from 11am to 9pm.
The Nuremberg trials have inspired filmmakers before, from Stanley Kramer’s 1961 drama to the 2000 television miniseries with Alec Baldwin and Brian Cox. But for the latest take, Nuremberg, writer-director James Vanderbilt focuses on a lesser-known figure: The US Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who after the war was assigned to supervise and evaluate captured Nazi leaders to ensure they were fit for trial (and also keep them alive). But his is a name that had been largely forgotten: He wasn’t even a character in the miniseries. Kelley, portrayed in the film by Rami Malek, was an ambitious sort who saw in
Last week gave us the droll little comedy of People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) consul general in Osaka posting a threat on X in response to Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi saying to the Diet that a Chinese attack on Taiwan may be an “existential threat” to Japan. That would allow Japanese Self Defence Forces to respond militarily. The PRC representative then said that if a “filthy neck sticks itself in uninvited, we will cut it off without a moment’s hesitation. Are you prepared for that?” This was widely, and probably deliberately, construed as a threat to behead Takaichi, though it
Among the Nazis who were prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 was Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Goring. Less widely known, though, is the involvement of the US psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who spent more than 80 hours interviewing and assessing Goring and 21 other Nazi officials prior to the trials. As described in Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, Kelley was charmed by Goring but also haunted by his own conclusion that the Nazis’ atrocities were not specific to that time and place or to those people: they could in fact happen anywhere. He was ultimately
Nov. 17 to Nov. 23 When Kanori Ino surveyed Taipei’s Indigenous settlements in 1896, he found a culture that was fading. Although there was still a “clear line of distinction” between the Ketagalan people and the neighboring Han settlers that had been arriving over the previous 200 years, the former had largely adopted the customs and language of the latter. “Fortunately, some elders still remember their past customs and language. But if we do not hurry and record them now, future researchers will have nothing left but to weep amid the ruins of Indigenous settlements,” he wrote in the Journal of
RSS