Portrait Dans un Miroir

Raoul Ubac

1938 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Ubac was active in the Surrealist movement during the late 1930s. His photographs appeared frequently in the Surrealist publication "Minotaure," alongside photographs by Brassaï, Boiffard, and Atget, as accompaniment to texts by Breton and other Surrealist poets. Surrealism's efforts to tap the creative powers of the subconscious led them through a landscape of dreams, chance, sexual fantasy, and madness. Photography, essentially a realist medium, yet one with a remarkable power to distort appearances, was appreciated for its unique ability to force a rupture in the surface of perceived reality. "Convulsive beauty," Breton's term for this abrupt encounter with the subconscious, became the group's elusive, aesthetic ideal. This portrait, an image as provocatively revealing as it is concealing, is in fact a confrontation with the psychological discomfort of uncertainty. As one critic has written, the woman who stares out at us from the mirror could be the fictional character who "pushes André Breton to rewrite the question, 'Who am I?' in the form, 'Whom do I haunt?'" [KM; Johnson Gallery XXVI]

Artist

Raoul Ubac

Date

1938

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1987