Jacques-Henri LARTIGUE exhibition: the album of a life.

June 4 to September 22, 2003

11:00 AM to 9 PM every day. To 10:00 PM on Thursdays.
Guided tours on Wednesdays at 7:00 PM.
Admission: 6.50 euros.
A day-long center pass including admission to the Museum of Modern Art and all the temporary exhibitions costs 10 euros.
Phone: 01 44 78 12 33

Centre Georges Pompidou
Metro stations: Rambuteau, Hôtel de Ville, Châtelet
Bus lines # 29, 38, 47, 96
http://www.centrepompidou.fr/

          The photography of Lartigue (1894-1986)

           Lartigue snapped his first pictures at the age of six and spent the rest of his life chasing images, documenting reality and seizing fleeting moments for eternity. He waited, watched and photographed everything, reflecting most of the 20th century, always with the same desire to capture happy moments.

           This exhibition recreates the 1963 Lartigue exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art in its first room. The same year, that show, which traveled to 17 US cities over a three-year period, was followed by the publication of a 10-page article about the artist in the same issue of Life magazine about JFK's death, revealing Lartigue to a broad public.

           This section features shots of elegant ladies on the Normandy coast and in Villerville, Trouville, Biarritz, Monaco and Paris between 1900 and 1915. The portraits of lively women wearing hats with veils, so typical of the period, are especially moving. Lartigue candidly photographed them in their splendid Sunday best, walking their dogs, climbing the cliffs at Etretat (a sea resort on the French side of the English Channel), strolling on the beach under their parasols. His sensibility comes through in each picture. Clearly, here was a man who loved life and had a passion for encounters, movement and fleeting subjects (such as speeding cars, the first airplane flights, divers, etc). He obviously took tremendous pleasure in seizing fast movement.

           Stereoscopic views are on display in two other rooms. Developed in 1840, this technique was highly fashionable in the early 20th century. Using a double-lens camera, the photographer took pictures that can be viewed in 3D with a special device. This section is fascinating: the astonishingly life-like 3D snapshots plunge visitors into various moments and slices of life. For example, the pictures of Bibi, Lartigue's first wife, taken during their honeymoon in Chamonix are an incursion into the couple's privacy. The shots of her in the bathtub, or wearing a short-sleeved blouse as she gets ready after her bath, are amazingly alive. A 3D scene from 1912, Marie Lancret strolling through the woods, is especially striking: the movement of her body, the many details of her elegant clothes, the scalloped skirt, the embroidered jacket, the jewelry, the big hat, the horses and carriages passing by behind her pull the viewer into the image, into the instant itself. It is a superb journey back in time.

           The rest of the show focuses on 14,317 album pages, many of which are projected onto screens. In 1902, Lartigue started composing albums of photos that he either took or collected. They are family pictures as well as portraits of the unknown and famous people he met. The whole 20th century files past in chronological order with shots of Kirk Douglas, Sacha Guitry, Juliette Gréco, Martine Carole, Pope John-Paul II, Senator John F. Kennedy, Yves Montand and Karajan side-by-side with the women in Lartigue's life, Bibi and Renée, the extraordinarily beautiful and particularly photogenic Rumanian model with whom he had a passionate two-year affair, his second and third wives, his friends, family, people he loved and admired. A series of pictures of Picasso and Cocteau, steeped in warmth and affection, is especially touching. Lartigue rightly said of himself, "I'm alarmed at my selfishness. Inside me there is a spectator who watches without caring about circumstances, without knowing whether or not what is happening is serious, sad, important or funny. A kind of extraterrestrial who is visiting Earth just to enjoy the show."

           This is an outstanding exhibition of a modern artist split between his passion for photography, painting and writing and above all expressing his desire to communicate life in all its forms.

           After leaving the show, visitors can gaze at Paris from the panoramic platform on the same level, and have a meal or a drink while enjoying the sweeping view of the city from north to south that takes in Sacré Cœur, the Opera House, the Invalides, the Eiffel Tower, the Pantheon, the François Mitterrand Library and many other landmarks.

My cousin, Paris, 1905		Grand Prix of the ACF Dieppe, 26 June 1912