Objects Reacting Poetically

This series is a photographic collaboration between three of the most important modernists of the pre-war period. It consists of 25 square format, black and white photographs, which can be displayed either as a five by five square grid, or as a single line. The work is a combination of various kinds of photographic image, including close-up images of organic objects and formations; and of man-made objects and fragments of industrial materials. Both the organic and the industrial are shot with a distinctive modernist style despite engaging the logic of the Surrealist found object. However, these images are also interspersed with photographic documentation of a performance involving all three artists and a block of melting ice held up to the light. The work was made in an experimental way during one of the many walks the artists would take together, exploring the forest of Fontainebleau near Paris, or the Normandy coast, and the prints were originally assembled in this grouping by Perriand as an album of the same name. This series would be the first work of its kind in the museum's collection, and would be transformative in their ability to show the relationship between modernism (in architecture, painting and design), and the kinds of practices and processes associated with the influence of the Surrealist movement.