Lartigue's Riviera

Rating:
Summary: INTO THE LIGHT
Review: The woman with her back to us might be Grace Kelly. It is an afternoon full of the languor of warmth. Minutes before, luncehon has ended and the air is spiced with aioli, lavender and Chanel. Just out of shot the last of the ice is cracking under the drained Dom Perignon. Thus from the sumptuous cover of this memorable family album we are invited by Jacques-Henri Lartigue into the conspiracy of fantasies that only the French Riviera accommodates. Lartigue's access was privileged. Born into wealth at the end of the nineteenth century, his natural stomping ground comprised the grands salons of the greatest hotels on earth - the Eden Roc at Antibes, the Negresco at Nice, the Gray d'Albion at Cannes. From these gilded terraces he dreamed of being a painter, while the Hispano-Suiza cooled at the kerb. Like Bonnard and Matisse before him it was the light that enmeshed him, and from the age of eight, when he received his first wood-frame camera, he was experimenting with color and form in the manner of the modernists. But Edenic Riviera life offers attractions which, in volume and variety, can become distractions. Perhaps this explains the paucity of international coverage of Lartigue's growth before the middle sixties, and the failure of his measure alongside Blumenfeld and Man Ray. A born adventurer and bon vivant, he courted the Riviera's copious delights - in company of Abel Gance, Maurice Chevalier, Colette, Chagall - with a dionysian abandon that may have undercut his work. But the work is what it boils down to, and the sample presented here, compressed from the 130 albums and 100,000 negatives he presented for conservation to the French government in the late 70s, displays a genius as emblematic of midi magic as Matisse. Unlike Brassai, Lartigue was working till the end of his long life. As he approached his nineties he commenced a dramatic series of light impressions entitled "As Long as I Still Have a Shadow". These (glimpsed here) perhaps best express the intangible beauty of a blue day at Cannes, and the abiding value of Lartigue.