Lucien Clergue (1934–2014) was not yet twenty in 1953 when, after a bullfight in Arles, he presented his first photographs to Pablo Picasso. This marked the beginning of a twenty-year-long friendship.
It was thanks to the discovery of his early portfolios after the photographer’s death that we can get a glimpse of the searing intensity and dark poetry that had captivated Picasso and, later on, Jean Cocteau.
The seven “swatch books,” where fabric samples have been replaced with contact sheets, present the most radical themes in Lucien Clergue’s work: carcasses, ruins, melancholy acrobats and harlequins, his series on bulls which offers a unique perspective on tauromachy, and lastly his early nudes.
Raised by a single mother, who wanted him to become a violinist, Lucien Clergue was ten when his home was destroyed in an August 1944 bombing. His mother fell ill and died shortly thereafter.
From the very start, Clergue’s photography was consistent with a conceptual approach, far removed from the practices of French humanist photography predominant at the time. Clergue’s early explorations reveal the scars of his painful childhood and the experience of omnipresent death.
It was only later, to appease his friends who found him overly dramatic, that he made his first timid forays into nude photography.
The female bodies on the Camargue beaches seem to burst from the sea with joyful vitality unprecedented in photography. Headless torsos offer lush, unfettered, sensuous forms. The photos, which foreshadow the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, brought Clergue great notoriety.
Having caught the eye of collectors very early on, he became one of the few French photographers to have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961. He returned to France convinced of the necessity of creating a photographic collection.
In 1965, along with his childhood friend and Arles heritage curator, Jean-Maurice Rouquette, Clergue wrote to forty photographers requesting prints.The Musée Réattu in Arles became the cornerstone of the first French contemporary photography collection.
In 1969, the two friends, joined by the recent winner of the Prix Goncourt, Michel Tournier, founded the Rencontres internationales de la photographie. In 1982, with the assistance of Maryse and Antoine Cordesse, the École nationale supérieure de la photographie was established in Arles by the President of the Republic, François Mittérand.
If Lucien Clergue was thrust to the forefront, it was thanks to his insatiable hunger for culture and encounters with other artists. In the 1950s, he discovered the Gypsy guitarist Manitas de Plata.
In 1979, he defended a thesis before Roland Barthes by submitting nothing but photographs. The jury recognized Langage des Sables as an assemblage no less eloquent than words.
The story told in the present exhibition is as much about Lucien as it is about Clergue; it unfolds a new hierarchy of works, from the early portfolios to Langage des Sables. The artist’s talent as a storyteller has contributed to his success; his voice, recorded a few months before his death, accompanies the visitors. The Grand Palais has given his rightful place to this world-famous artist and the first photographer to enter the Académie des beaux-arts in 2006.
François Hébel and Christian Lacroix
EXHIBITION
Lucien Clergue 1934 – 2014
From November 14th, 2015 to February 25th, 2016
Le Grand Palais
avenue Winston Churchill
75008 Paris
France
http://www.grandpalais.fr
