Carte postale autographe

The card is addressed to Pierre Lagarrigue, a collaborator of the two Kessel brothers in the early 1930s: he was the graphic designer of the magazine launched by Gaston Gallimard in 1928, Détective, “the greatest weekly of true crime,” which enjoyed equally resounding success. The head of the NRF put Georges Kessel in charge of the paper, who assembled a team of experienced reporters and a few star writers from the Gallimard stable, such as Pierre Mac Orlan, Francis Carco and Joseph Kessel. Future great photographers, such as Germaine Krull and Éli Lotar, contributed to the magazine. Finally, some of Pierre Lagarrigue’s photomontages evoke Futurist or Surrealist collages: he was also responsible for the paper’s layouts, “modeled on American magazines devoted to true crime stories (True Detective Mysteries, Best True Fact Detective, Authentic Detective, etc.). The photograph is carefully framed, cut out and mounted, but always presented as a witness document. Pierre Lagarrigue, until 1936, then Jean-Gabriel Séruzier, practiced careful and often inventive layouts in the interplay of text and illustrations” (Amélie Chabrier and Marie-Ève Thérenty, Détective. Fabrique de crimes? Nantes, Éd. Joseph K., 2017).

As a footnote, on 12 June 1955, the Grande Rue de Montplaisir became the rue des frères Lumière, in tribute to the two brothers who had their factory and house there and where they made countless innovations, filing more than two hundred patents.