JACQUES-HENRI LARTIGUE "RENEE EN VOITURE" 1931, LATER PRINT

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Description:

The Artist: Jacque-Henri Lartigue (French, 1894-1986)

Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) was a French photographer and painter noted for the spontaneous, joyful photographs he took beginning in his boyhood and continuing throughout his life. Lartigue’s boyhood photographs were almost always candid images taken of his family and friends.. Lartigue studied painting at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1915 to 1916 and would always consider himself a painter first and foremost. It was nevertheless as a photographer that he would establish his reputation. In the 1910s and 1920s Lartigue enthusiastically photographed such subjects as automobile races, fashionable ladies at the seashore and the park, and kite flying. These photographs, with their informal approach to everyday subjects, reveal his free spirit and love of life, rather than a concern for photographic technique and craft, and often capture a sense of movement. He generally worked in black and white, but during this period he also experimented with the recently developed Autochrome color process, which satisfied his painterly interests. In the 1930s and ’40s he continued to capture images of middle-class leisure that, like his earlier images, display a charm and joy that is detached from the traumas of world war.

Lartigue was discovered in the early 1960s and shown at a Museum of Modern Art exhibit in New York City in 1963. His photographs were acclaimed in part because of their departure from the formal, posed portraits that had been typical of early photography and also because of their ingenuous charm.

Lartigue was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1975. A collection of his work, Diary of a Century, was published in 1970 (reprinted 1978). Later collections of Lartigue’s work include Les Femmes aux cigarettes (1980; Women Holding Cigarettes) and Les Autochromes de J.-H. Lartigue, 1912–1927 (1980; The Autochromes of J.H. Lartigue, 1912–1927).

He continued to photograph into his 90s, and he extended his settings to include England and the United States during this later period.

The Story:

"There was definitely something about Renée. When the legendary French photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue met her while strolling the streets of Paris in 1930, he fell in love instantly. Tall, chic and hiding coquettishly under a wide elegant hat, he nicknamed her the ‘parasol’. Together they embarked on what Lartigue remembers as an “eternal vacation”, a dreamlike two-year holiday in the South of France, where he documented her riviera style and endlessly photogenic form. She became his Mona Lisa, but just like Da Vinci’s muse, we know very little about Renée Perle. After the couple’s affair ended in 1932, it’s as if she vanished from the world, having only existed in that beautiful but brief snapshot of time through the lens of her lost lover…We know that Renée came from a Romanian-Jewish background and when she arrived in Paris, she started out as a model in Paris for the French couturier, Doeuillet. She appears to have escaped the Nazi invasion of World War II, later married, and according to records, Renée passed away in 1977 in the South of France where her young romance had been immortalised. In the year 2000, her descendants quietly released 340 unseen photographs documenting her relationship with Lartigue for auction. Renée had preciously held onto them for nearly 50 years up until her death."

(A Photographer’s Forgotten Muse on the French Riviera by Messy Nessy, June 6, 2023)

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