Although he is the son of Louis Begley and the step-son of Anka Muhlstein, Adam Begley credits his mother, Sally Higginson Begley with nurturing his literary interests. After writing fiction as a his thesis at Harvard, he realized that he was in fact the critic he became. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times and he is a contributing interviewer to the Paris Review's Art of Fiction series.
After John Updike, why Nadar, a name most Americans see credited in books about France, but know little about?
Way back in 1995 I saw a big exhibition of Nadar photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Nadar instantly claimed a place in my private pantheon of great artists. But as John Updike observed in his review of that show, “Photography is a matter of time”—and nearly two decades passed before I tried to find anything out about life of the man who was born Félix-Gaspard Tournachon. The catalyst was Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life, a marvelous, very unusual little book, part essay, part short story, part memoir, in which Barnes briefly sketches Nadar’s life story, touching also on his adventures as a balloonist, about which I knew nothing. Thanks to Barnes, Félix charmed me, as he had charmed so many others. I went back to the photographs to look again, and I also started digging around. When I found out there were no biographies of Nadar in English, I jumped in.
A man of varied interests and talents: writing, sketching, political cartooning, photography and producing soirées; Nadar personified the word Bohemian. Talk about the famous fête champêtre of 1840 that served as a launching pad for his career as a master self-publicist.
When Félix was twenty and had just recently acquired the nickname Nadar (his bohemian pals had transformed Tournachon into Tournadard and then Nadard, with a ‘d’ that eventually dropped off), he threw a party to which he invited everybody he knew—along with celebrities he wished to know. It was an unabashed bid for notoriety, but executed with his usual charm. The very idea of announcing and organizing a fête champêtre and holding it in his small room in the middle of Paris (at 88, rue Montmartre, a thoroughly urban environment) was already tongue-in- cheek, as was the assumed name of the host: “M. le vicomte de la Tour Nadard.” This noble personage boasted of the brilliance of the guests who would be attending his soirée, assuring his invitees, “There will be decent women.” The program of events touted a sequence of outlandish entertainments including swings, clay pigeon shooting, and fireworks. The guests lured by this elaborate nonsense spilled out of Félix’s room—rechristened “l’Élysée Nadard”—down the staircase and out onto the sidewalk of the rue Montmartre. A midnight surprise was promised—whatever it was, Félix had made his mark. The fête was a huge success. At a tender age, Félix had established himself as a master publicist, his self- promotion sweetened by self-parody.
Nadar might be considered the first celebrity photographer. Who were some of his most famous subjects?
Nadar had an obsession with making a record of the important cultural figures of his day, and in the service of that obsession he photographed pretty much every famous person in the Paris of his day: George Sand, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Baudelaire, Manet, Courbet, Delacroix, Gautier, Doré, Berlioz, Rossini—the list goes on and on. One of his most famous subjects was utterly unknown when he photographed her in the mid-1860s. A strikingly beautiful young actress, barely twenty, came to the studio for a sitting; her name was Sarah Bernhardt, and within
a few decades she would be the most famous woman in the world. Nadar photographed her loosely wrapped in a white burnoose, and also in a shiny black velvet cloak, both garments voluminous, their folds teasingly suggestive. It’s not just that she appears to be naked under her wrap—the portraits carry an erotic charge that’s complicated and enhanced by the withdrawn, private expression and a whisper of melancholy. She’s not yet the Divine Sarah, but she’s nonetheless giving a performance: a young actress, vulnerable, alone, with something inside her—a fearsome ambition—that she’s shielding from view.
Polydore Millaud, publisher of LE PETIT JOURNAL was an important friend who gave him a platform for his witty drawings and words. Describe that relationship and the importance of LE PETIT JOURNAL, at the time, and as a historical record, used by Walter Benjamin in his ARCADE PROJECT.
As a young bohemian, Félix was befriended by Polydore Millaud, whose spectacular career in publishing and finance earned him the nickname “Millaud-Million.” Self- taught and self-made, the son of an unprosperous ribbon merchant, Millaud was a mere seven years older than Félix. One of his early successes was Le Gamin de Paris, a newspaper sold exclusively at theater doors, a novel idea at the time. Long before Millaud founded Le Petit Journal, the most widely read French paper of the nineteenth century, he was a mentor to Félix as well as an inspiration: he gave him a job and also a close-up view of what fresh ideas, gumption, and publicity could achieve. In 1839, at Le Négociateur, a Millaud newspaper devoted to the concerns of finance and industry, 19-year-old Félix worked as little more than a dogsbody. Within a matter of months, Millaud had founded L’Audience, which covered court hearings and trials, dryly at first but with a growing
appetite for the sensational. Félix was named editor. Soon the paper was reporting the news with dramatic flair and also running fictional accounts of grotesque and macabre crimes of the sort being prosecuted in Paris courtrooms. Millaud would appear at the offices of L’Audience, rub his hands, and tell his young staff, “Give it zip, my sons! Give it zip.” Fifteen years later, Millaud handed Félix a financial lifeline at a desparate moment by buying 620 of his celebrity caricatures for a cool eight thousand francs.
Nadar first looked through a lens of a camera thanks to his brother Adrien and from that moment he was caught up in the photomania that gripped Paris. Discuss Daguerre and the factors that contributed to the meteoric rise of photography in mid-19th century Paris.
In 1848 there were just thirteen photographers in Paris offering their services to the general public. Over the next two decades, the number grew to more than 350, with 1855 marking the start of the most rapid expansion. Félix, who set up his brother Adrien with a photography studio in 1854, was part of a stampede, a cultural and economic phenomenon sometimes known as photomania. The extraordinary boom was due in part to excitement over the mere fact of photography. Enthusiasm had been building gradually since the mid-1830s, when rumors began to circulate that Louis Daguerre, building on experiments performed with the inventor Nicéphore Niépce, had developed a chemical process that allowed him to fix and preserve the image produced by a camera obscura. In 1839
the secret of Daguerre’s process was made public, announced at a joint meeting in Paris of the Academy of Science and the Beaux Arts Academy. A dozen years later an Englishman, Frederick Scott Archer, invented the collodion-on-glass negative. By the time Félix and Adrien got started, exposure times had been drastically reduced (to less than a couple of seconds), and the mass production of photographs was a reality; the cost of having one’s photograph taken had fallen accordingly. This coincided with a general mood of prosperity in the French capital, especially from 1852 to 1857, when a great many people (most of them men)—attracted by the modest initial outlay, the short apprenticeship, and the promise of easy profits— decided to set up studios and declare themselves photographers.
Almost all of those pioneers went bankrupt, almost all are forgotten. Not Nadar.
At the age of 8 or 9 Félix saw his first aeronaut (balloonist) and the memory remained so powerful that it became his next great passion. In fact, he became so celebrated that Jules Verne used him as the model for Ardan (an anagram of Nadar) as the main character in FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON. Discuss those adventures.
Félix made his first ascent in a balloon in 1857, and was hooked on flight from that moment. The next year he made the first photographs from the basket of an airborne balloon and filed a patent for aerial photography. But his most famous ballooning adventure was aboard the humongous gas balloon he christened Le Géant. He had built Le Géant with the express purpose of proving the futility of attempting to navigate in balloons—he believed the future of flight would be in heavier-than-air “aero-locomotives,” an idea that baffled his contemporaries. He demonstrated the perils of ballooning with his epic second ascent in Le Géant: it ended with a crash-landing that dragged on for half an hour, as the huge balloon bounced perilously through a rural landscape, nearly killing everyone aboard. The catastrophe made headlines from Paris to New York. If ballooning could be discredited, Félix foresaw a glorious future for aviation—“From all corners of the world, man takes off, prompt like electricity, and soars and descends like a bird at the desired spot”—and it was that vision, combined with his fearlessness, that inspired Jules Verne. In an essay on the crash of Le Géant, Verne wrote about Nadar in glowing terms: “At the beginning of great discoveries there is always a man of this caliber, a seeker after difficulties, enamored of the impossible, who tries, tries again, more or less succeeds, and in the end sets things in motion.”
One of his great legacies is the Panthéon-Nadar, a huge lithograph composed of 250 portraits. It is considered a national treasure and the preliminary sketches reside in the Bibliothèque National de France. What was the inspiration and how many years did it take to assemble?
In 1851, when new censorship laws killed off political caricature, Félix conceived of a series of four outsize lithographs depicting twelve hundred French luminaries— writers, playwrights, artists, musicians—with a separate sheet devoted to each category. An illustrated who’s who of the nation’s cultural life, the Panthéon- Nadar, as he called it, was a brilliant idea—but the execution was a shambles, and in the end only one sheet was finished (depicting writers and journalists), and it consisted of 250 caricatures, not the three hundred he’d envisioned. The work he
managed to complete (nearly four years later) is remarkable: each of the 250 caricatured writers is distinctive, and almost all are amusingly presented—a “delicious museum of grotesques,” one critic called it. A sensation when it was published, the Panthéon-Nadar was a financial disaster for Félix, who nearly went bankrupt. But he never lost the urge to present a panorama of Parisian personalities—and that’s what he accomplished, in the end, with his photographic portraits.
With his multiple talents and gift for self-promotion please speculate on the life of Nadar in the age of social media and the selfie.
Nadar loved gossip and he was compulsively gregarious—he was fascinated by people, the raw stuff of humanity—and he may well have loved social media had he lived to see it. One thing he probably wouldn’t have liked is the fleeting, disposable aspect of today’s image-making. Nadar’s mission was to preserve for posterity a moment he thought was important. These days, every image is by its nature devalued: effortlessly produced, replicated, and distributed—and thrown away without a thought. Nadar was born before the invention of photography and when he learned to take photographic portraits (the only kind of photography that really engaged him), the process was laborious and time consuming. The sitter had to hold still, which meant in practice that they looked stiff and characterless. Perhaps Nadar’s greatest talent was his charm, his ability to put people at ease, to coax them into showing us their true self. He wanted to achieve with every photograph an “intimate resemblance”—and did so with astonishing frequency. As a result, thanks to Nadar, we know what nineteenth century looked like. We know it intimately, as though we’d seen it with our own eyes.
Adam is currently working on a biography of Harry Houdini for the Yale Jewish Lives Series that will be published in 2018.
