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By Dana Thomas
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In 1962, an unknown 68-year-old French photographer named Jacques Lartigue and his wife, Florette, took their first trip to the United States. While in New York, Florette showed some of her husband's prints to Charles Rado, a former photo agent. Rado was knocked out by what he saw: sharp, stylish pictures of the rich and beautiful at play on the French Riviera during the '20s and '30s. He took the pictures to Life magazine and the Museum of Modern Art; the following year, MoMA mounted Lartigue's first one-man show and Life published 12 pages of his photos. "They seemed--like a fine athlete--to make their point with economy, elegance, and an easy precision," wrote John Szarkowski, Life's photography director at the time. "It seemed I might be looking at the early undiscovered work of [Henri] Cartier-Bresson's papa."
High praise, indeed. Born in 1894 to a wealthy haut bourgeois family, Lartigue received his first real camera from his father--a railroad baron, banker and publisher--when he was 7. He dedicated himself to learning the intricacies of photography, printing his own pictures and pasting them neatly in albums. Some 100 prints and 130 albums are now on display in "Jacques Henri Lartigue 1894- 1986: The Album of a Life," at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (through Sept. 22).
Lartigue snapped the world around him: the Belle Epoque dames strolling in their bustles and plumed chapeaus; man's first attempts to fly airplanes; motorcar races through the French countryside; tennis players in midvolley at the Davis Cup. His images are so full of movement and joviality that you can feel the hope and wealth that sprang from the Industrial Revolution. "I was born happy," he once said. "It helps, you know."
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Then came the Great War. Rejected by the military because he was too skinny, Lartigue watched the war through his lens: a friend in a new uniform, a soldier driving a snazzy car. In 1919 he married Madeleine Messager, and they moved from Paris to the French Riviera. He and Bibi--as he called his wife--and their son, Dani, passed their afternoons swimming at the elegant Hotel du Cap. They played tennis, sped around in convertibles and lunched in splendid villas along the coast. All of it he photographed (as well as painted), capturing the brilliant light and lush life of the 1920s Cote d'Azur. "Luxury," Lartigue wrote in his diary in 1923, "becomes beautiful and even almost real under the sun."
In 1930 Lartigue fell for a ravishing Romanian model named Renee Perle and was soon divorced from Bibi. His portraits of Perle--splayed on a sofa or framed by a big floppy hat--are the most powerful of his oeuvre, and several albums' worth are displayed at the Pompidou. "My love for Renee is a splendid sickness," Lartigue said, "unsupportable, unlivable." He wasn't exaggerating; by 1934 it was over, and he married Marcelle Paolucci--known as Coco--who became his new favorite subject. But the arresting passion of the Renee period is missing from those pictures.
Eventually, Coco left him. Lartigue remained in the south of France, where, in 1945, he married Florette Ormea, a 21-year-old local girl. They split their time between the Riviera and Paris until they went to America in 1962 and Lartigue was "discovered." Following the MoMA show, fashion photographer Richard Avedon declared Lartigue "the most deceptively simple and penetrating photographer in the short, embarrassing history of that so-called art." Young photographers such as Helmut Newton and Jean-Loup Sieff quizzed him on the secrets of his work. To Sieff, Lartigue advised: "Fall in love."
Lartigue eventually became a "professional" photographer. He shot the official portrait of President Valery Giscard d'Estaing in 1974, the Grimaldi family next to their pool for Vogue in 1981 and lush gardens in the south of France for House and Garden magazine. In 1979 he donated his collection of 100,000 photographs and 130 albums to France. In 1986, he died in Nice at the age of 92. "Basically," he once wrote in his diary, "I am selfish or egoist. I only stop before what interests me or amuses me." We can all be thankful for that.
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