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• Issue #164
• Article

Auction House Millon-Cornette de Saint Cyr will hold an auction of more than 500 photographs by Ilse Bing acquired by the current collector directly from the Ilse Bing Estate.

Vintage exhibition prints, drawings, documents and other manuscript material are included in the auction, which will be held in Paris at Drouot Montaigne, 15 avenue Montaigne 75008 Paris on November 16, 2009, 7 pm (local time). The phone and fax during viewing: phone: +33 148 00 20 91 and fax: +33 148 00 20 83. The sale can be viewed November 14-15, from 11 am to 6 pm, and November 16, from 11 to 12 am, at Drouot Montaigne. You can also preview by appointment with the expert Christophe Goeury.

For more information and condition reports, you can contact the expert Christophe Goeury at +33 142 54 16 83 or +33 6 16 02 64 91, or by email at: christophegoeury@hotmail.com . In the past few years, Goeury has put together the sales of several major photography collections and estates, including the catalogues for Brassaï, Blanc and Demilly, and Sacha Stone.

Ilse Bing was one of the great photographers of her generation. Born in Frankfurt in 1899 into an affluent bourgeois family, she studied at the university before becoming part of the avant-garde of photography. In 1930, when she arrived in Paris in a city bubbling over with artistic creativity, she was the only professional to work exclusively with a Leica. Emmanuel Sougez, the famous photographer and critic, gave her the nickname that stuck for the rest of her life, "Queen of the Leica". Ilse Bing explained: "This small format camera seems to be an extension of my eye that moves with me; it lets me make things more alive".

Ilse Bing is one of the great, rare women photographers, along with Lee Miller, Dora Maar, Bérénice Abbott, Germaine Krull and Florence Henri who brought a completely new outlook to an era of huge growth for the illustrated press and advertising. The 500 prints for sale cover the three main phases of her life as a photographer that reflected where she lived: her German period at the end of the 1920s (modern photojournalism); her years in Paris, "les années folles", or the crazy years, during the 1930s; and her New York photography, which began in 1936.

Goeury puts this sale into context when he notes, "Auctioning a collection of 500 original prints spanning the working life of an artist as important as Ilse Bing is an important event for the art photography market, and gives admirers, collectors and professionals the chance to buy historical prints."

Estimates are reasonable and range from €300 to €15,000 (for an album of 12 photographs of the Moulin Rouge).

The normal contact for the auction house is Millon Cornette de Saint Cyr, 5 avenue d’Eylau 75116 Paris, France. Phone: +33 1 47 27 94 34 and fax: +33 1 47 27 70 89; its website is http://www.millon-associes.com . The contact at the auction house for the sale is Beatrice Brengues, who can be reached at + 33 147 27 15 92, or by email at: bbrengues@m-csc.com .

There is a printed catalogue that can be ordered and the catalogue can be seen online on Millon's website at: http://www.world-encheres.com/millon/vo16112009/asp/index.asp .