Jacques Henri Lartigue

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(b Courbevoie, nr Paris, 13 June 1894; d Nice, 13 Sept 1986). French photographer and painter. He trained as a painter at the Acad?mie Julian in Paris from 1915 to 1916 under Jean-Paul Laurens and Marcel-Andr? Baschet (1862-1941) and held one-man exhibitions of his decorative portraits and flower paintings from 1922 onwards. It was as a photographer, however, that he established his reputation in the 1960s. In spite of the fact that he consistently referred to himself as a painter, his photographs eventually eclipsed his other work.

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Lartigue, Jacques-Henri (1894-1986), French photographer. Photography's best-known child prodigy, Lartigue caused a sensation in 1963 when MoMA, New York, unveiled a selection of his early photographs. These comprised stop-action images of aeroplanes, sporting events, and fashionable women in the Bois de Boulogne, most taken during the 1910s. Concurrently, Life magazine published a body of Lartigue's work, broadening his fame. Despite his controversial status as an untrained amateur, Lartigue's reputation crystallized through a series of books and exhibitions, notably Boyhood Photographs of Jacques-Henri Lartigue: The Family Album of a Gilded Age (1966); Diary of a Century, with an afterword by Richard Avedon, in 1970; and ‘Lartigue 8 × 80’, his first Paris retrospective, held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1975. In 1979 Lartigue made an enormous gift of albums, negatives, diaries, and paintings to the French state.

Lartigue's photographic production might be divided into three phases. In 1902, aged 8, he began photographing under the tutelage of his father, a successful engineer, financier, and serious amateur photographer. Lartigue's early photographs, made with a variety of cameras, depict leisure activities in Paris, and at the family's summer home in Rouzat. These photographs, often indistinguishable from those of Lartigue's father, show a range of technical and aesthetic accomplishment. Lartigue entered a second phase in 1910 when, at 16, he began emulating the work of photo-reporters. His sports and fashion photographs, taken during the 1910s, are preoccupied with the same kind of instantaneity and social wit disseminated by magazines like La Vie au grand air, Je sais tout, and Fémina, which Lartigue read assiduously. He had numerous photographs published during this period, the first of which, of an aeroplane over Paris, appeared as a frontispiece in La Vie au grand air in 1912. During the mid-1910s, Lartigue moved into a third phase, photographing as a sideline to other artistic pursuits. Starting in 1913, he began making short films with a cinematograph. In 1915 he studied painting at the Académie Julian, leading to a moderately successful art career.

Lartigue's photographs began to appear in Point de vue, the French illustrated weekly, during the mid-1950s, but received no critical attention. Their impact in the USA, however, where an art photography movement was blossoming, was more favourable. Full of movement and social humour, Lartigue's photographs struck American viewers as the intuitive creation of an untrained eye. John Szarkowski, curator of the MoMA exhibition, described Lartigue as a ‘true primitive’, and argued that Lartigue had unwittingly discovered the essence of modern photography: to compose pictures out of the flux of life. This modernist assessment drew Lartigue into the company of other well-known hand-held camera practitioners, namely Henri Cartier-Bresson and Garry Winogrand. Equally important, Lartigue has been loosely classified as an amateur, a photographer without extensive training who photographed for the love of it. These views reflect the general lack of understanding of the diversity of photographic practice c.1900.

— Kevin Moore

Bibliography

• Szarkowski, J., The Photographs of Jacques Henri Lartigue (1963).
• Rice, S., ‘Remembrance of Images past’, Art in America, 80 (1992).
• d'Astier, M., Bajac, Q., and Sayag, A. (eds.), Lartigue: l'album d'une vie, 1894-1986 (2003).
• Moore, K., Jacques-Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist (2004)

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