NEWTON (Helmut). - Lot 835

NEWTON (Helmut). "Spitzner Museum" (ca 1980). Reunion of 6 original photographs, bearing on the back the stamp of the photographer "Helmut Newton / Paris, France". Attached is a signed ms. letter from Helmut Newton (in envelope), dated June 8, 1980, addressed to Margo Bruynoghe: "Here are the prints, sorry they are coming / late. They are going to be exhibited / in Los Angeles, and I am very happy you gave me the permission / to photograph these / wonders / Again thank you! / Friendship / Helmut Newton". Also enclosed are 3 old catalogs of the Spitzner museum: Analytical and explanatory catalog of the famous and old collections of Doctor SPITZNER, a second copy in English and a German variant. Also enclosed, 4 presentation sheets for the exhibitions of the Spitzner Museum in 1979 and 1980, in Belgium and in France. The Spitzner Museum is an anatomical museum created in 1856 by Pierre Spitzner (1833-1896) and presenting wax casts of human bodies and monstrosities. This museum then became a cabinet of medical curiosities presented at fairs. Pierre Spitzner bought the 80 pieces of the wax collection of Guillaume Dupuytren, head of the Rouvière Museum from 1799 to 1801, which was then stored in the Cordeliers cloister, opposite the Faculty of Medicine. Thanks to these pieces, Pierre Spitzner opened in 1856 in Paris his "Athaeneum, Anatomical and Ethnological Museum" in the "Pavillon de la Ruche", place du Château d'eau (now place de la République). The first purpose of the museum was to present the secrets of the human body and also to visualize the diseases that everyone could contract, especially venereal diseases. He completed his collection with the first autopsies performed in hospitals. In 1885, a fire destroyed the exhibition space and he was expelled. He became a showman and travelled with his collection to the fairgrounds of Belgium, Holland, Germany and England. When the doctor died in 1896, his wife Désirée continued to travel around Belgium with her cabinet of curiosities. She died in 1939, but the heirs continued to run the "museum" until 1950, when they moved the collection to a shed near Brussels, as this type of exhibition was no longer to the public's taste. The collection was rediscovered in 1970 by the gallery owner Margo Bruynoghe who mounted an exhibition in Ixelles the same year, then in Paris in 1980, at the Maison de la Communauté Belge and at the Avignon Festival in 1983. The collection as a whole was then auctioned at Drouot, purchased by the Roussel-UCLAF laboratories and later donated to the Paris Anatomical Society. From 1997, the collection was exhibited in Paris at the Delmas-Orfila-Rouvière Anatomy Museum, before being transferred in 2014 to the premises of the Faculty of Medicine in Montpellier. Delvaux immortalized the museum in a painting entitled "The Spitzner Museum", and previously in a drawing with the same title. Very nice set.