Gallery Idan Wizen - Fine Art Photography »» Fine art store »» César Mercedes & Tank

Interior View

Size currently shown: Plop

Prints still available

Edition de 26 - all sizes included | 10 XS, 7 S, 5M, 3 L and one unique print in XL

20 x 20 cm (7.8 x 7.8”)
250 
Sold out
40 x 40 cm (15.7 x 15.7”)
600 
Sold out
60 x 60 cm (23,5 x 23,5”)
1400 
Sold out
80 x 80 cm (31.5 x 31.5”)
2900 
Sold out
120 x 120 cm (47.2 x 47.2”)
15000 
Sold out

Choose Size and Options

Original signed and numbered print

From

250 

START TO SHOP

Please note, the price of this work of art is progressive.
This means that every time one of the copies is sold, the price of the remaining prints increases.

Payment Options

Pay online in 4x without fees with PayPal. From 63  / month for this artwork.

Are you a company ?
Leasing for this artwork over 12 to 48 months. From 30  / month
Please, contact us to know more about leasing inquiries

Step 1: Choose A Size

ARTWORK DETAILS

Edition of this artwork
Edition de 26 - all sizes included | 10 XS, 7 S, 5M, 3 L and one unique print in XL

Type of print
C-Print

Signature
On the back.

Certificate of Authenticity
Yes, included by the gallery.

Year of Creation
1974 - 2012

Fine Art Artist
Arnaud Baumann

Collection
★ ICONIC PORTRAITS ★

César was born in Marseille in 1921 and left public school at 12 to assist his cooper father. Enrolling in the School of Fine Arts in Marseille at 15, he explored drawing and later developed an interest in sculpture until 1939. In 1942, he received a scholarship to move to Paris, spending ten years at the School of Fine Arts in his unique way. Working in various studios, he eventually became the Grand Massier. Facing financial challenges, he briefly returned to Marseille in 1944, then went back to Paris in 1945. The 1950s marked the start of his recognition, with continuous exhibitions, awards, and solo shows worldwide. In 1970, he became a head workshop professor in Paris. César, driven by a “love of the craft” and a passion for innovation, demonstrated humor in his work. Influenced by artists like Picasso, Giacometti, and others, he reached artistic maturity in the late 1950s. Notable works include the controversial Compressions in 1960, followed by Giant Impressions, polyurethane use, Expansions, and art spectacles. César passed away in Paris in 1998.

★ ICONIC PORTRAITS ★

★ ICONIC PORTRAITS ★

Who’s Who is the directory of people who are supposed to be important in the life of a country. The first English edition dates from 1849, the French from 1953. Arnaud Baumann’s more recent, fresher, more unbuttoned Who’s Who began in the ’80s, when as a young photographer, he began to frame in his viewfinder people who mattered, particularly to him. For example, the libertarian squad of the newspaper Hara-Kiri, of which there remains a spirit, a disruptive and ill-bred body of work, a legacy, an offspring, a tragedy – the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January 2015 – and a book-bible, Dans le ventre de Hara Kiri (Éd. La Martinière, 2015), a tumultuous echography produced by Arnaud Baumann with his long-time alter ego, photographer Xavier Lambours. The difference between the ordinary Who’s Who and his is that in his it’s the texts that are brief and secondary, and the photos that are large and important.

If one of his predilections as an artist is portraiture, his favorite exercise, his originality, his great success, his stylistic signature, is the happy portrait. To a large extent, Iconic portraits is an exhibition – and a collector’s book (limited to 100 copies) – about mischief and irony, euphoria and joy, humor, jokes, mischief and self-mockery, which is to derision what self-criticism is to criticism: progress. More than a Who’s Who, it’s a gallery of tableaux-cabrioles, exaggerated mimics, pasquinades, as we used to say in Victor Hugo, stretching from the end of the xxᵉ century to the beginning of the xxiᵉ, while we wait for the rest, because a century is a long time. Even more than a yearbook, it’s a kind of Légende dorée in images, secular, profane, cheerfully pagan, if you leave out Abbé Pierre, Julien Green and a few emeritus heads. More than a golden legend, it’s a multicolored dictionary of biographies written on silver film, from Leica to Polaroid camera. Nostalgic readers will see it as an affectionate, droll, effervescent, Dionysian and sometimes sulphurous repertory – but this sulphur smells of humanity – of a host of milieus and periods that make up a demography of preferences, a selective sociology and, in short, the chosen inventory of a memorialist multiplied in fifteen worlds.

In the end, we find dozens of old acquaintances who, on screens, stages, newspapers, books, art galleries and museums, have accompanied us through our successive ages, and who are a bit like relatives we’ve known, if not in the world, at least in the spectacle of the world, a substitute phantasmagoria in which we undoubtedly live more than in reality. And if many of these long-lost acquaintances have disappeared, most of them, at the time of these portraits, are the embodiment of that kind of happiness of being and vitality of group or couple that radiates from the image when the happiness of being and vitality of the subjects are redoubled by those of the portraitist. A photographer’s portraits, in fact, are also the photographer’s portrait, and each of them, when the subject, photographer and portrait are up to scratch, makes a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

The atmosphere, precisely, is one of celebration, of rest from toil. But from time to time, you need to take a break from rest, not so much from work as from seriousness, anxiety and danger. This is what happens here, without the photographer deviating much from the measured baroque or youthful naturalness that he conveys from the first of his images to the last.

Emil Cioran, tucked away in his attic in the Latin Quarter, a figure of defeated dough, raised towards a skylight he would like to open, or close. Hair as thick as anguish. The face of an abused old child, overwhelmed, slapped in the face by the nasty rectangular light of a Heaven where the persecuting demiurge of the Gnostics has shamelessly taken up residence. Photogeny of the inconsolable. Look no further for a better illustration of disappointed mysticism.

Bashung, for instance. That stork finger on his lips. This finger of finesse with a scarlet nail. That finger that isn’t his, but which suits him so well… The finger of his feminine side, since they say you have to have sides, like with cakes? A queen of hearts? An adorer? Of modesty? Delicacy? Melancholy? Of death? Louis XIII, secret king, dies with an identical gesture or pose, but it was his personal index finger. Silences of the complicated. Imaginative finds.

Like this “Self-portrait with C-gasoline”, in which the photographer, as a deliberate arsonist, takes the stage and pays for it with his own life. The price might have been exorbitant, but in the end it’s less a portrait of gasoline than a portrait of an essence, an ontology, a way of being, a thief of fire, warm, ignited, a risk-taker, yet not a nutcase. This running flame is Prometheus in miniature, unleashed not on his rock at the ends of the earth, but in the Val d’Oise, on the edge of cartoonist Siné’s fire-extinguisher pool.

Baumann, referring to his portrait of elderly Philippe Soupault, overloaded with ninety-two years of memories and as if appalled, he the surrealist, to have spent an entire existence in a reality that is eventually nothing but smoke: “Undressing can also mean showing one’s wrinkles, the passing of time. To be able to accept death (…) A portrait is successful, I think, when it reaches that dimension. Nakedness.

THE QUESTION IS: THE EXPOSURE OF WHAT EXACTLY?

The answer comes from Jean Paulhan: “People gain from being known. They gain in mystery. That’s the great thing about human beings: if you happen to discover the mystery they are at first, you’re bound to discover the enigma they are afterwards. So, who’s who?

And what is Iconic Portraits, if not a concentration and pileup of revealing rebus, like any true portrait exhibition? But an invigorating concentration and pileup, because if no exhibition or book of the living has ever been so lively, no exhibition or book of the dead has ever been so cheerful, restless, motley, variable, energetic, offbeat, whimsical and inventive.

Arnaud Baumann

Arnaud Baumann

Arnaud Baumann, French portrait photographer and videographer, was born in 1953 and left an indelible mark on the world of photography. His career began alongside photographer Xavier Lambours, with whom he had the opportunity to capture unique and intimate moments by photographing the behind the scenes, hysterics and editorial conferences of Hara Kiri and Charlie Hebdo magazines. This experience marked the start of a promising career.

Over the years, Baumann has been published in renowned magazines such as Hara Kiri, Libération, Le Nouvel Observateur, Télérama, VSD, Paris Match and Géo, thus demonstrating his talent and versatility as a photographer.

During one of the key periods of his career, from 1978 to 1983, Baumann immortalized the evenings at Fabrice Emaer’s “Palace”. Through his photographs, he captures the very essence of these extravagant evenings, immersing us in the electric and liberated atmosphere of a bygone era.

Baumann devotes a large part of his career to portraiture, becoming a master in the art of revealing the essence of well-known personalities and cultural actors. His portraits are imbued with depth and sensitivity, to the point of capturing the soul of his subjects.

Throughout his career, Baumann reinvented his style while remaining faithful to what makes him a generational photographer. His process rethinks the links between the structure of his vision and the reality that surrounds it. His photographs are recognizable by their precise framing, precise colors and always mastered compositions.

Feel Free to Contact us