In a dream-like tableau, soap bubbles float in the air as a young child blows a bubble while lying on a table covered with roses shrouded in tulle from her dress.

On the 150th anniversary of the birth of Lille (France) photographer Pierre Dubreuil (1872-1944 ) in 2022, The Palace of Fine Arts in Lille held the exhibition “Pierre Dubreuil. Photographic Paintings”. (1.) Critic Gersende Petoux makes some observations on this important early French pictorialist who would go on to become a ground-breaking modernist in later decades:

But Pierre Dubreuil is not a photographer: he is a painter, a draftsman, a poet, a revolutionary, a humanist, a pun lover, a free thinker… Not content with being a pioneer, an innovator in technical and artistic processes in photography, he literally rethought its scope and meaning.

Coming from the pictorialist movement, he makes photography and painting rhyme, using heliogravure, a process combining engraving and photography, gum bichromate prints, requiring the use of a brush and bringing the photographer closer to the painter, reworking his negatives into different prints, which he retouches in as many different expectations, to the point of abstraction. Continues… (2.) (translated)

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1. “Pierre Dubreuil. Tableaux photographiques”. Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts du 20 octobre 2022 au 27 février 2023. The exhibit featured over 90 modern prints from slides made from negatives by Dubreuil in the 1930s as well as original works like this heliogravure.
2. Excerpt: Gersende Petoux, le 6 décembre 2022: Quand la photographie devient peinture – Pierre Dubreuil: Source: Aralya: Tout est art