Lucien Clergue [antikvár]

At the age of seventy-one years. Lueien Clergue still remembers these words, passed along to him by a col- league decades ago 'The artist is born complex and tries his whole life to simplify and the amateur is born simple and tries to complicate everything."1 Clergue has maintained thai, from the beginning, his sole interest is the human condition: love. life, transience and death_and observation. His photographic career of fifty years has affirmed this belief. For five decades. Lucien Clergue's cosmological. mythological and phjsical homeland has been his birthplace in Aries. Provence. Both his art and his life have remained an ever-evolving quest to explore the unknown, while he has remained rooted in Aries and Mediterranean culture. His mother believed him to be an artist. He began lessons on the violin, which continued for nine years. He loved Bach sonatas and their rigorous structure. When he was thirieen. his mother gave him a camera. But events, both personal and national, overtook his childhood. His parents divorced. The Second World War first brought separation from his mother and then devastation to his hometown. After the war he returned to his invalid mother in Aries. Their home and fruit shop were gone. Now living in damp cellars in poverty the young but necessarily mature Clergue abandoned school and music lessons to support his mother and himself. When she died in 1952. Lucien Clergue was eighteen years of age. Still working in a factory, his artist's soul set about finding meaning in a life defined by loss and death. With no money to finance his dream of becoming a film director in the spirit of the great Italian directors he admired. Clergue accepted the loan of a Rolleiflex camera. With that tool, he launched an artistic journey of fifty years [hat continues. In his native Aries, an ancient port city. Clergue was surrounded by Greek and Roman ruins as well as those caused by World War II air raids. His bruised soul saw only crumbling buildings, dead animals, and cities of the dead and his images reflect his intense exploration of death. They are dense with darkness and shadow In Lucien Clergue's early photographs there are no luminous, sunlit views. Aries, in the delta of the Rhone River, is known for its Roman necropolis and twelfth-century cemeteries nearby. These were his photographic haunts and the focus of his stark images. Clergue noted much later. "Even in my first years of serious photography. I had already found the themes that were always to remain my own."2 His images of graves seem like abstract paintings. Jean Cocteau.with whom Clergue collaborated on several projects, would later say of Clergue that he worked in the manner of a painter. Early in 1955. Clergue produced his first masterpiece. He choreographed a series of photographs of a group of children, the Saltimbanques. The series was modeled after the traveling circus performers who in earlier years roamed the city The photographer created tableaux vivants. sometimes making the costumes for the players himself. The images, posed in shadowed painterly compositions, are stark and powerlul. At first glance, they are arresting: wiih more scrutiny, they become surreal and disturbing. The children are stiff, motionless, alone in their own worlds. Described in Posterbook 'They are performers in a parade for a circus that would never give a performance, on a horse cart without a horse: a dancer who couldn't dance, a fiddler in need of a string, a trapeze artiste in need of a trapeze, an acrobat who lacked a partner ro do his act with, in the company of rhc sad. large-eyed harlequin or dreamer."1 It is an allegorical tale of transition from childhood to adulthood, of innocence lost. Clergue remembers the moment in July 1955: "I discovered the sun."1 His passion to explore the unknown had not changed, nor had his themes of life. love, transience and death. Lucien Clergue's small world, centered on his town and his factory job. suddenly expanded dramatically when a friend suggested they follow the gitans or gypsies as ihey made their annual pilgrimage to his region. Clergue found a way into their circle, and later would pair José Reyes, the father of the five Reyes brothers of Gipsy Kings fame, with guitarist Manicas de Plata (Little Hands of Silver). He took them around the world. They performed at Carnegie Hall, the Royal Albert Hall and the United Nations. Later in that year, he sent work to Picasso, whom he had met two years earlier. They talked for five hours. Though decades apart in age. the Spanish artist sensed in the young man's work a shared artistic quest, an element of mystery Clergue formed a close friendship with the artist that endured until his death in 1971 Picasso also provided valuable access to a cosmopolitan circle and a connection with the avant-garde poet, writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau Clergue and Cocteau maintained a lively correspondence and collaborated on several projects. Cocreau. who described Clergue as "a poet with a camera."! proposed to publish a small book of love poems by Paul Eluard, accompanied by Clergue's photographs. Corps mémorbale appeared in 1957 with a cover designed by Picasso. Originating in the mythology of ancient Greece and retold in numerous great paintings, the most notable being Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Corps mémorable is an allegory of the birth of Beauty from the union of Soul and Matter. Clergue's photographs of nudes emerging from the