Lartigue, the photographer who painted the sun on flowers with a camera

A delicacy. let go. The hunter of happy moments. color photographsproduced by Fundação Canal, is an exhibition that covers almost seven decades of color photographic work by Jacques Henri Lartigue. Painter and poet, but above all an eye trained to detect beauty, the perfect framing, the right moment. Father of photography by Henri Cartier-Bresson, his images become memories of unforgettable moments that one would like to remain in forever.

“What am I trying to do? Paint, not flowers in the sun, but sun in flowers… in flowers, in trees, in everything and anything.” Lartigue (Courbevoie, 1894 – Nice, 1986) wrote in his diaries on April 15, 1954. Words from a painter who photographs or a photographer who paints with a camera and who has experienced the photographic medium since he was eight years old. His fame came from the hand of black and white, but color was an obsession that accompanied him throughout his life; Even at the end of his career, he decides to rephotograph his most iconic monochrome photos in color.

This reinterpretation closes the exhibition route with a projection in which periods and techniques are juxtaposed and in which the differences between their compositions, crossed by the influence of American street photography, which transforms and humanizes its language. Of the 118,000 images donated while alive to the French State in 1979, only a third were in color, and this exhibition explores this special synergy, from which Lartigue invents happiness.

Concerned since he was young with the transience of time, his insatiable curiosity leads him to experiment ways to capture the fullness of life to relive it eternally. Jacques Henri is fascinated by the beauty that surrounds his everyday life as a wealthy class, in fact, his father is the eighth fortune in France at the end of the years. XIX. Seduced by the new discoveries of automobiles and aviation, he grew up surrounded by amateur photographers and the illustrated press.

In 1902 they gave him his first camera, but it was only with the discovery of autochromy by the Lumière brothers, in 1912, that the artist was able to experiment with color. Autochrome allows you to apply small dots of color to 6 x 13 cm plates. that they lack a negative and that they need specific spectators to visualize the image in three dimensions, and whose long exposure processes force the poses of those portrayed and exasperate Jacques Henri, obsessed with movement in space.

Lartigue allows himself to be fascinated by the beauty that surrounds his rich daily life

This first room (1912-1928) shows 10 of the 86 plates that are preserved together with the respective sheets of the 119 albums that he cataloged together with his last wife and muse, Florette, and which the visitor can look through the stereoscopic displays to experience its fascinating three-dimensionality.

Known as the photographer of flowers, Lartigue transforms this motif into language, studying its chromaticism, rhythm and musicality in depth. In 1915 he entered the prestigious Julien Academy where Matisse, Leger or Calder studied painting and turned flowers into a laboratory for also try abstraction.

[Launch, experience the past]

The exhibition brings Madrid to this second room world premiere some textile studies that show how his concerns also include more technical and artisanal issues related to decorative arts and fashion, as is the case with the series of poster necklines in Paris used to make a scarf for the prestigious Maison Craven.

In 1936, Kodakchrome in the United States and Agfa in Germany revolutionized photography, ushering in the modern era of color. Lartigue sees a new opportunity to experiment with a simpler technique and more intense colors and gets carried away by the media power of advertising and cinema.

In 1962, chance meant that the couple's trip to New York coincided with charles radofounder of the emblematic Rapho agency, which, after Florette's insistence that she see her photos, puts them in contact with john szarkowskithe new director of MoMA's photography department, who, fascinated by his bold frames, organizes a retrospective for him that would catapult him professionally.

The last room (70s), delicately mounted on tempered glass panels in pastel tones, conveys the consecration of your career on a variety of themes in a square format in which the influence of American photography can be appreciated, from the portrait of Picasso and Cocteau to a pilgrimage to Lourdes or a cycling race. Lartigue is pure elegance, scopic pleasure. See and be happy.

Follow the topics that interest you