Adolphe de Meyer – The Substance of a Venetian Dream

Adolphe de Meyer

Adolphe de Meyer. The Substance of a Venetian Dream, is the first ever European museum exhibition devoted to the photographer Adolphe de Meyer (1868–1946). This follows the remarkable discovery in 2019 in the municipal library of Tours: a series of 75 photographs documenting his life and photographic work in Venice. This collection is being displayed in its entirety for the first time, and offers an exceptional glimpse into his personal and artistic world.

A pioneer of fashion photography

Adolphe de Meyer was born in Paris in 1868 and enjoyed a fascinating and ground-breaking career in both Europe and the United States. Historians recognise him today principally as a pictorialist photographer (a movement that approached photography as an art form), as a virtuoso portraitist, and above all as a fashion photographer. He was one of the first to elevate fashion photography to artistic heights, creating elegant images for the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. It is less well known that he was also an interior decorator, designer, art collector, journalist and writer. He turned his whole life into a work of art, in which photography, clothing, interiors and stagings expressed a coherent artistic vision: that of a man continuously reinventing himself and his surroundings.

Globetrotter

His travels were a constant and invaluable source of inspiration, usually in the company of his wife and creative partner Olga. Japan was an early love, followed by China, India and South America. De Meyer made the world his field of experimentation, and he also proved able to apply the meticulous precision of his studio to the photographic work done outside his atelier. Despite a remarkably successful and influential career he was almost unknown when he died in Los Angeles in 1946.