Portrait photographique

The only known print, this photograph is the work of the Hungarian photographer Rosa Klein, known as Rogi André, and was taken in 1934, in Paul Éluard’s apartment.

Rosa Klein was for a time the wife of André Kertész, who introduced her to photography in the 1920s. Amid the intellectual ferment of Paris, she became close to avant-garde artists, notably the Surrealists, of whom she made numerous portraits, following Kertész’s advice: “Never photograph something for which you feel little enthusiasm, but only what interests you passionately.” She favored — a novelty at the time — photographing her sitters within their own surroundings, and some critics have noted a Cubist influence in her portraits, for instance when she constructs a geometric composition through the play of light and shadow, as here, in this portrait using the elements of the room in which Éluard sits.

In 1941, during the Second World War, Rogi André was forced to flee to the free zone and take refuge in Touraine because of her Jewish origins, before returning to Paris and hiding there with the help of the gallerist Jeanne Bucher.

She died on 11 April 1970 in Paris, in poverty, and all her modest belongings were sold at the Hôtel Drouot. Part of her archives, notably her prints, were nevertheless saved from dispersal through the efforts of Jean-Claude Lemagny, curator responsible for contemporary photography at the Département des Estampes et de la Photographie of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, who acquired them for the BnF collection. This print is missing from that collection; four prints are known, however, of a closer portrait of Éluard from the same sitting, showing the poet seated with his back to the door: one at the BnF, a late 1982 print at the Centre Pompidou (AM1983-429), a print inscribed by Paul Éluard to Max-Pol Fouchet, and a 1944 print signed by Rogi.

Of this variant, showing the poet standing, only this single print is known — otherwise unpublished.