encouraged him to experiment with various techni-
ques, including the recently rediscovered technique of
solarization. Ubac’s wife, Agathe Schmidt (‘‘Agui’’),
whom he had met two years before in Cologne, posed
for numerous portraits and nude studies that seem to
be irradiated from within by light. Using superimpo-
sition, Ubac made a portrait titledAgui dans le miroir
au tain endommage ́(Agui with the Damaged Mirror
Silvering), which was reproduced in the surrealist
review,Minotaure, in 1938.
By 1934, Ubac was permanently established in
Paris. That year, Ubac took part in the illustration
of painter and sculptor Camille Bryen’s book of
poems,Actuation poe ́tique.Atthesametime,both
artists joined in a billboard campaign:Affichez vos
poemes, affichez vos images!(Post up your poems, post up your images!). One of Ubac’s pictures, showing a slice of liver escaping from the open mouth of a young woman, echoes French philosopher Georges Bataille’s famous notion of ‘‘unformed.’’ Refusing the conventional formal categories considered proper to each object, the photographer transgressed them, asasortofmanifesto. But it is essentially between 1936 and 1939 that Ubac’s work fully fits in Surrealism, for instance, with visual quotations of the surrealist painters like Rene ́Magritte (La Chambre(The Sleeping Room, 1936), or Giorgio de Chirico (La rue derriere la
gare/Hommage a`Chirico,(The Street behind the
Station/Homage to Chirico, 1936). In these pic-
tures, photomontage tends to create strangeness
by opening a bedroom door onto the sky or by
crowding a desert street with antique sculptures.
But it is mainly from the creation of his major
series,Penthesilea, that Ubac was associated with
the surrealist movement. Produced between 1937
and 1939, this series, inspired by Heinrich von
Kleist’s eponymous play, re-examines the mythic
story of Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons. It is
present in a series of collages that show fighting
women, made of nude photographs Ubac had
taken of Agui in the 1930s. Transformed by several
techniques like superimposition, solarization, and
montage, these pictures form virtual frescoes.
Other techniques explored by Ubac also allowed
him to introduce a distancing, which is essential to
‘‘surreality.’’ One technique, explored in 1938, is
paraglyphe, wherein the illusion of low relief is cre-
ated by using the negative image to mask the posi-
tive image. This process gave rise to what Ubac
called ‘‘fossils,’’ images giving the impression that
what they show has been petrified. In 1939, he
created what he dubbed ‘‘bruˆlages’’ (burnings), ob-
tained by progressively melting a negative that is
then printed out by placing it under a heat source.
In both cases, the photographic image essentially
becomes a material manipulated by the artist to its
own limits.
By its nature, Ubac’s work was strongly related
to the Surrealists, in particular to Hans Bellmer,
poet Benjamin Pe ́ret, and painter Victor Brauner,
and Ubac became officially affiliated to this move-
ment with the publication of his works in the semi-
nal Surrealist magazineMinotaurebetween 1937
and 1939.
With the outbreak of World War II, the Surreal-
ists were scattered; Ubac initially took refuge in
Carcassonne in southern France with Magritte and
his wife, in 1940. After the Nazi occupation, Ubac
and Magritte were repatriated to Brussels, where
they published together two editions ofL’invention
collective. In the second edition, Ubac published the
textLes pie`ges a`lumie`re(The Light Traps), in which
he insisted on the transformation of visual percep-
tion by photography. His importance as one of the
Belgian Surrealists is made clear in Paul Nouge ́’s
preface for Ubac’s 1941 exhibition catalogue. In
Paris again in 1942, Ubac associated with the ‘‘Mes-
sages’’ group, led by Jean Lescure, as well as with
the ‘‘Main a` la plume’’ association, which both
manifested Surrealist tendencies. Ubac illustrated
Lescure’s text,L’exercice de la purete ́(The Exercise
of Purity). Although he continued his own research
on spatiality and relations between objects as in the
seriesObjets relie ́s(Related Objects) of 1942, Ubac
began to turn away from photography, abandoning
it completely in 1945. Although he continued to
create paintings, sculptures, etchings, and drawings,
his photographic work largely sank into oblivion
until a resurgence of interest in Surrealism in general
and Surrealist photography in particular brought
renewed attention to his accomplishments as a
photographer at the end of the 1970s. Raoul Ubac
died in Dieudonne ́,FranceonMarch22,1985.
DanielleLeenaerts
Seealso:Bellmer, Hans; History of Photography:
Interwar Years; Man Ray; Manipulation; Photogra-
phy in France; Solarization; SurrealismBiography
Born in Malme ́dy, Belgium, August 31, 1910. First stay in
Paris, meets the poet Jean Gacon, 1929; Student in Lit-
erature at the Sorbonne, meets the Montparnasse artists
1929–1931; Student at the Werkschule, Cologne, 1932.
First series of photographs on the Hvar Island (modern
Croatia), 1932; Meets Man Ray, 1933; Definitely estab-
lished in Paris where he opens a bookstore, illustrates
Camille Bryen’s poems (Actuation poe ́tique), 1934; Takes
part in the Surrealist meetings, experiments with differ-
ent photographic techniques, 1935–1939; PhotographsUBAC, RAOUL