Venice hosts the largest retrospective ever in Italy dedicated to Jacques Henri Lartigue

The Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice will host from Feb. 29 to June 12, 2020, the largest retrospective ever held in Italy dedicated to French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue (Courbevole, 1894-Nice, 1986).

Curated by Marion Perceval and Charles-Antoine Revo and Denis Curti, The Invention of Happiness, this is the title of the exhibition, will present the public with 120 shots, including 55 previously unpublished ones, from Lartigue’s personal albums. It will also feature archival materials, books such as Diary of the Century, magazines of the time, a slide show with album pages, and three stereoscopies with images depicting elegant snowy Parisian landscapes.

All these documents will trace his career, from his early twentieth-century beginnings to the 1980s. A pivotal year was 1963, as John Szarkowski, recently appointed director of the photography department at New York’s MoMa, exhibited his work in the New York museum, when by then the photographer was almost 70 years old.

The exhibition will revolve around Lartigue’s rediscovery, starting with the MoMa exhibition, during which his earliest pre-World War I shots were presented.

Inspired by newspapers and illustrated magazines, Lartigue took an interest in the wealthy Parisian bourgeoisie who gathered at the great automobile prizes or the Auteuil horse races, as well as the elegant men and women who frequented them. “Lartigue’s part of the world is that of a wealthy, bourgeois Paris of the nouveau siècle, and even when Europe would be traversed by the horrors of the two world wars, Lartigue would continue to preserve the purity of his photographic microcosm, continuing to fix on film only what he wanted to remember, to preserve. To stop time, to save the moment from its inevitable passing. Photography becomes for Lartigue the means to exhume life, to relive happy moments, again and again,” writes Denis Curti.

Following his success with the New York exhibition, in the late 1960s, Lartigue met Richard Avedon and Hiro, among the most influential fashion photographers of the time, who immediately became passionate about his art. In particular, Avedon suggested he create a kind of “photographic journal”: with the help of Bea Feitler, the then art director of Harper’s Bazaar, Diary of a Century was published in 1970, by which he was recognized among the greats of 20th-century photography.

The last sections of the retrospective will focus on the 1970s and 1980s, the years of collaborations with the cinema: Lartigue worked as a set photographer for numerous films. He also collaborated with the fashion world, but the artist was never able to step away from everyday life to take his shots.

An in-depth look will also be given to the memoirs that Lartigue wrote in the 1960s and 1970s, when he began reassembling his albums with all his shots.

The retrospective is organized by Civita Tre Venezie and promoted by Fondazione di Venezia, in close collaboration with Donation Jacques Henri Lartigue in Paris, and under the patronage of the French Ministry of Culture.

For info: www.treoci.org

Image: Jacques Henri Lartigue, La Baule (1979) © Ministère de la Culture (France), MAP-AAJHL

Venice hosts the largest retrospective ever in Italy dedicated to Jacques Henri Lartigue

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