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MoMA Puts Eugène Atget Prints Up For Sale

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is selling 1,000 images taken and printed by photographer Eugène Atget. Atget photographed the streets of Paris for 30 years, his images capturing the richness, beauty, ordinariness and fantasy that is Paris.

The museum acquired 5,000 of Atget's images and 1,300 negatives from photographer Berenice Abbott and collector Julien Levy in 1968. Part of the collection consisted of duplicates and triplicates. A select 1,000 of those copies are now on sale for between $3,000 and $150,000, with a total value of $19 million. Some duplicates were too badly faded and could not be sold.

Peter Galassi, the chief curator of photography at MoMA, tells PDNewswire: "This is a period in which photographs, especially classical, modernist photographs of the 1920s, 1930s, have become more and more valuable and rarer, and there's more competition to acquire them."

Aside from the museum's collection of Atgets and another collection held by the French government, these 1,000 images put up for sale are the third most important collection in the world, he says. Last year, MoMA sold six Eugène Atget images, averaging $32,000 each.

Although MoMA has a great photography collection now, no collection is "ever finished," says Galassi, who wants to use money from the sale to boost the museum's current collection. "[The duplicates] have no role to play here. Otherwise they sit in boxes here. We can convert them to pictures we don't have."

So far, the response from collectors and curators have been great. Galassi is optimistic the images will sell well. Interested buyers should contact art dealer David Tunick in New York at (212) 570-0090.