Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) is mostly known for his black-and-white photographs. These have an ability to make the past look enviable: the motor cars, aeroplanes, the seaside holidays, the pet dogs, sport and the elegant Parisians (and especially the Parisennes); a place and time apparently possessed of unlimited sunshine and leisure. Even when technically imperfect, Lartigue draws the viewer in. Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Colour, at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, adds a further dimension to the familiar picture, demonstrating that colour was not an incidental aspect of his career but a recurring interest. Along with the prints there are stereo autochromes (a selection of which were for me the highlight of the show), lightboxes and projected images, as well as some of his fashion drawings. He flirted with abstraction and combining his interests in photography and painting.
Lartigue
started taking pictures early, and never lost the habit. His father, who we
learn was during Lartigue’s childhood the eighth richest man in France, gave
him his first camera when he was under 10, so Jacques was photographing from
childhood, recording his milieu. It quickly becomes clear he was not a
dullard snapshooter but a persistent experimenter. His fascination with
movement is particularly striking. He was attracted to things already in the
process of disappearing, such as a car passing, a body jumping, a dress blowing
in the wind, arresting the moment before it was gone (the exhibition aptly makes
the comparison with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment). In these he shows
a modernist sensibility.
He
began making autochromes in 1912, abandoning the process in the late 1920s
because the length of exposure required the subject to be static. He briefly
resumed making autochromes on a flexible base in 1946, presumably Lumicolor,
before switching to colour transparency film in about 1949-50. Ektachrome and
Kodachrome introduced a lusher dimension to the graphic economy of the
black-and-white work. Looking at his career as a whole, it seems less a case of
a brilliant youth followed by decades of repetition than of an artist returning
to familiar themes and finding new ways of seeing them. The exhibition makes
this apparent by pairing thematically related images in both black and white
and colour taken decades apart.
Ther
is though, I think, a caveat. Before he was obliged to take commissions he was
free to photograph what interested him. When he had to make a living as his
family’s fortunes declined, much of the work became more studied, with
commercial outlets in mind. He remained a fine photographer, with a creative
eye, but he lost a certain joie de vivre he had when he was able to play
around with nobody to please but himself. I did, though, like the fact that
when commissioned by the magazine Point de Vue to photograph the 1956
Grace Kelly/Prince Rainier wedding he subversively concentrated on the crowds
and other photographers, rather than the happy couple – unsurprisingly, his
pictures were not published.
Still,
why colour Lartigue has been largely neglected is a puzzle. As far back as 1980
he produced a book on his autochromes (translated into English by Brian Coe and
published in the UK the following year). More recently, Martine d’Astier and
Martine Ravache compiled a book in French which was translated into English as Lartigue:
A Life in Colour, on the back of an exhibition in Paris in 2015. Flammarion
issued a budget-priced book including colour in 2019. In 2024, Atelier EXB
published The Proof of Color, containing Lartigue’s 90 surviving
autochromes. But it is as if we have to discover this aspect anew.
So
the gallery has done a valuable service in highlighting this significant part
of his oeuvre, and for those willing to be seduced it is hard to resist
the show’s charms. It sends the visitor out of the peaceful gallery into an unglamorous
Milton Keynes Lartigue would undoubtedly have avoided, with a suspicion that
one has been looking at the world too seriously and, like Lartigue, should seek
out the playful. MK Gallery has done a good job in bringing this relatively
unfamiliar Lartigue to Britain.
Mounted
in collaboration with the Association des Amis de Jacques Henri Lartigue, the
French Ministry of Culture and diChroma photography, the exhibition runs from
20 June to 4 October 2026.
References
d’Astier,
Martine and Ravache, Martine. (2015) Lartigue: A Life in Colour. New
York: Abrams.
Donation
Jacques Henri Lartigue. (2019) Jacques Henri Lartigue. Flammarion.
Lartigue,
Jacques Henri. (1981) The Autochromes of J. H. Lartigue, 1912–1927.
Translated by Brian W Coe. London: Ash & Grant.
Lartigue,
Jacques-Henri. (2024) Jacques-Henri Lartigue: The Proof of Color. Edited
by Marion Perceval and Kevin Moore. Paris: Atelier EXB.
