🎉   Please check out our new website over at books-etc.com.

Seller
Your price
£65.00
Out of Stock

Jacques Henri Lartigue

The Invention of an Artist

By (author) Kevin Moore
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Princeton University Press, New Jersey, United States
Published: 10th Oct 2004
Dimensions: w 229mm h 229mm d 32mm
Weight: 1304g
ISBN-10: 0691120021
ISBN-13: 9780691120027
Barcode No: 9780691120027
Trade or Institutional customer? Contact us about large order quotes.
Synopsis
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.

New & Used

Seller Information Condition Price
-New
Out of Stock

What Reviewers Are Saying

Submit your review
Newspapers & Magazines
"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