Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist

As a young boy, Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) set about passionately recording his life in photographs, first documenting his domestic circle and later capturing the auto races, air shows, and fashionable watering holes of the Belle Epoque. His images have so bewitched modern viewers that even scholars have failed to see them clearly. In Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist, Kevin Moore puts to rest the long-held myth of Lartigue as a naive boy genius whose creations were based on instinct alone. Moore begins by exploring the milieu in which Lartigue became a photographer, examining his father's crucial role in teaching him the latest techniques as well as the larger context of the turn-of-the-century craze for amateur photography. Two events brought Lartigue before the public eye in America and created the Lartigue myth: In the summer of 1963, the first exhibition of Lartigue's work in the United States was held at the Museum of Modern Art, which hailed him as an important modernist photographer, a forerunner of the art-documentary style of the 1960s. That fall, Life magazine published a feature presenting his work as an optimistic and sentimental prologue to World War I. Both treatments portrayed him as a naive genius and Lartigue happily participated in shaping this new persona. In Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of an Artist, Moore successfully challenges the Lartigue myth using examples from popular magazines and the cinema. Illustrated with more than fifty of Lartigue's photographs and drawings as well as press imagery from the period, the book offers a radical reassessment of the photographer and his work.

Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTION--Lartigue's Invention 7 FORMATION: lartigue as Amateur, 1894-1922 Chapter One: Amateur Photography 17 Chapter Two: Sport and fashion 71 Chapter Three: Cinema 129 TRANSFORMATION: Lartigue as Artist, 1963-1979 Chapter Four: Lartigue at MoMa 163 Chapter Five: Lartigue after MoMa 195 CONCLUSION 215 Appendix A: Key to names of Lartigue's Family, Friends, and Pets 218 Appendix B: 1963 MoMa Exhibition Checklist 219 Chronology 221 Notes 223 Acknowledgments 255 Bibliography 256 Index 266 Photography Credits 272

About the Author :
Kevin Moore is Henry Luce Foundation Research Associate in the American Art Department at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.

Review :
"Moore delves revealingly into the personal and cultural context of Lartigue's work and its 'rediscovery,' and he writes well enough to make this complex story engrossing."--Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle "This is not a dry scholarly text, but an interesting account of the shaping of an art career and the strong influences of the artist's visual culture."--Cheryl Shugars, Philadelphia Inquirerer "An enthralling construction and deconstruction of an artist's life."--Choice "A sophisticated, clearly written and argumentative book... As Moore convincingly argues, Szarkowski's promotion of Lartigue coincided with the curator's early attempts to validate photography as an art whose formal qualities were derived not from painting or other 'synthetic' mediums but from its own 'analytic' traditions of vernacular and commercial practice."--Andy Grundberg, Art in America