Venice hosts Italy's largest exhibition on Jacques Henri Lartigue, the photographer who invented happiness

From July 11, 2020 to January 10, 2021, the Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice is hosting an exhibition of 120 photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue (Courbevoie, 1894 - Nice, 1986), 55 of which are previously unpublished: it is titled The Invention of Happiness and is the largest retrospective ever organized in Italy dedicated to Lartigue.

Curated by Marion Perceval and Charles-Antoine Revol, director and project manager of the Donation Jacques Henri Lartigue, respectively, and Denis Curti, the exhibition brings together shots from Lartigue’s personal photo albums, from which some facsimile pages will be exhibited. These are complemented by some archival materials, books such as Diary of the Century (published under the title “Instants de ma vie” in French), magazines of the time, a slide show with album pages, and three stereoscopies with images depicting snowy landscapes and elegant Parisian scenery. These documents trace Lartigue’s entire career from his early twentieth-century beginnings to the 1980s and reconstruct the history of this photographer and his rediscovery. The year 1963 was a pivotal one for the artist: John Szarkowski, then newly appointed director of the photography department at MoMa (the Museum of Modern Art in New York), exhibited his work at the New York museum, allowing Lartigue to achieve success when he was nearing his seventies.

The itinerary of The Invention of Happiness is organized around major moments of rediscovery of Lartigue’s work, beginning precisely with the exhibition at MoMA, during which his earliest pre-World War I shots are presented, making him the enfant prodige of photography. Inspired by the illustrated newspapers and magazines of this era, Lartigue was interested in the wealthy Parisian bourgeoisie who gathered at the Grand Prix motor races, the Auteuil horse races, as well as the elegant men and women who frequented them.

Following the success of his exhibition at MoMa in the late 1960s, Lartigue met Richard Avedon and Hiro, two of the most influential fashion photographers of the time, who immediately became passionate about his art. Avedon, in particular, asked him to dig through his archives to unearth some shots in order to create a photographic ’journal’. The selection of these images, made by Avedon himself and Bea Feitler, photoeditor of Harper’s Magazine, led to the publication in 1970 of the volume Diary of a Century, which definitively established him among the greats of twentieth-century photography. After an in-depth look at the period of his rediscovery, the final sections of the Venice exhibition focus on the 1970s and 1980s, marked by his collaborations with the worlds of film, where he worked as a set photographer for numerous films, and fashion. Lartigue’s eye, however, never managed to stray far from everyday life, always capturing many curious and irony-laden details. A focus is also reserved for the memoirs that Lartigue wrote in the 1960s and 1970s, when he began reassembling his albums in which he had collected all his shots.

“With the reopening of the Casa dei Tre Oci to the public, the Venice Foundation,” says President Michele Bugliesi, “confirms its commitment to the city’s side, after the serious crisis generated by Covid-19, for an international revival that cannot but pass through culture. For years now, the Three Oci has been an extraordinary house of photography where major exhibitions such as this one dedicated to Jacques Henri Lartigue are hosted. Being able to make the Casa dei Tre Oci once again an asset at the service of the city is a tangible sign of the Foundation’s desire to be in every form a proactive actor for the development of Venice and its territory.”

The exhibition, accompanied by a bilingual Marsilio Editori catalog with a testimonial by Ferdinando Scianna, is organized by Civita Tre Venezie and promoted by Fondazione di Venezia, in close collaboration with Donation Jacques Henri Lartigue in Paris, under the patronage of the French Ministry of Culture. For all info you can visit the Casa dei Tre Oci website.

Pictured: Jacques Henri Lartigue, La baule (1979).

Venice hosts Italy's largest exhibition on Jacques Henri Lartigue, the photographer who invented happiness

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