Jaques-Henri Lartigue
				French, 1894-1986
		Website about the artist: www.lartigue.org
			Introduction
			Photographing for his own innocent pleasure the varied day-to-day activities of his family and friends, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, a child prodigy of the camera, captured the excitements and fragile beauties of La Belle Epoque at the beginning of the century with a striking freshness and authenticity. Richard Avedon has called Lartigue "the most deceptively simple and penetrating photographer in the history ... of that art." Lartigue was born into an upper-middle-class family in Courbevoie, near Paris. He began to photograph at age seven when he received his first camera, a large 13 x 18 cm affair on a wooden tripod, from his father, an amateur photographer himself. As accompaniment to his photographs, Lartigue kept a diary, illustrated with sketches, in which information regarding the photos was recorded. Upon receiving his first camera, he wrote: "Now I will be able to make portraits of everything ... everything. I know very well that many, many things are going to ask me to have their pictures taken, and I will take them all!" But Lartigue took few posed photographs; his concern lay with seizing the moment as it was speeding by. Ladies of fashion in the Bois de Boulogne, bicycle and early auto races, glider planes and kites were all seen with an instinctive spontaneity and exuberance unimaginable in an older, more sophisticated photographer. For Lartigue was influenced by no one and his pictures existed for his private amusement and that of his family. The world he recorded soon vanished with the arrival of World War I. Lartigue was able to document the end of the old world and the beginning of the new. In addition to his black-and-white stills and muted autochromes, Lartigue made several short films in 1913 and 1914. The following year he attended the Académie Julian where he studied under J.-P. Laurens and made his first oil painting. After armed service during the war, Lartigue lost his youthful passion for photography and devoted himself to painting. It is as a painter that he has made his reputation, though he has continued to photograph sporadically, including a series of images of films-inprogress by directors such as Abel Gance, François Truffaut, and Claude Renoir. While his paintings were on display in galleries in New York and Paris, including a major exhibition at Galérie Charpentler in 1939, Lartigue's photographs were closeted. After the publication of a selection of his photographs in Life in 1962, the first public exhibition of these images took place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1963. Since then a number of books of his photographs have been published and further shows mounted at Photokina, Cologne; the Photographers' Gallery, London; the Neikrug and Witkin galleries, New York; the Museum of Decorative Arts, Paris; and ICP. In 1979 he donated his entire work to the French government.