The Bold Innovations of a French Exhibition

It was not until 1977, when the Musée National d’Art Moderne moved to the Centre Pompidou, and 1978, when the Musée d’Orsay was created, that photo­graphy was fully accepted as a form of artistic expression at French museums and that collections of photographs came to be regarded as worthy of institutional acquisition and display. This article deals with the first exhibition in France to combine painting and photography on the gallery walls of a major cultural institution, the Bibliothèque Nationale: Un Siècle de Vision Nouvelle, which took place in spring 1955 at Galerie Mansart. In conceiving it, its curator, Jean Adhémar – a curator at the Cabinet des Estampes (the library’s prints and photographs division) and later its director – highlighted the institution’s special role in art-historical research, which had been based since the nineteenth century on the study of engraving and its links with other artistic disciplines. A study of the catalogue and the exhibited works reveals the originality of this French attitude to photography, especially in comparison to the line that had been followed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York since the 1930s. Unlike Alfred Barr and Beaumont Newhall, whose approach was based on the machine aesthetic, Adhémar chose to pursue an analysis linked to the major currents in painting from 1839 to 1950. In doing so, he paved the way for the future creation of the great French museum collections