40 Rue Cortambert by Jacques Henri Lartigue will be on show at Home@735 Gallery opening on Thursday June 15th. One of 9 artworks from the Badger & Fox Collection, the photograph taken in 1903 will hang alongside a painting by Tom Polo responding to Lartigue’s print.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) was a French photographer and painter noted for the spontaneous photographs he took beginning in his childhood 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. Born into privilege, Lartigue’s father was a banker, and the family belonged to the upper French bourgeoisie. He was afforded time to build race cars, oil paint, and learn the mechanics of photography from an early age.
Lartigue photographed everyone he came in contact with. His most frequent muses were his three wives, and his mistress of the early 1930s, the Romanian model Renée Perle. His photographic work came into art world prominence in 1962 when a meeting with curator John Szarkowski led to a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The importance of the work was immediately recognized, and numerous exhibitions and publications followed.
During his life, he was friends with influential artists such as Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Kees van Dongen, and has served as an important influence to later filmmakers, notably Wes Anderson. Lartigue’s work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. 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.
