Lucien Clergue

LUCIEN CLERGUE (Lucien Clergue (Arles, 1934 - Nîmes, 2014).
"Saltimbanquis".
Set of 4 photolithographs.
Printed signature.
Size: 40,5 x 29,5 cm (each).
Lucien Clergue was a French photographer, member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France.
He began learning photography in 1948. Four years later, during a bullfight in his hometown, he had the opportunity to show his photographs to Pablo Picasso, who was delighted with them and asked him to show him more, so for a year and a half he sent him photographs. In 1955 he met Picasso in Cannes, with whom he had a great friendship from then on and to whom he dedicated the book Picasso "mon ami".
In 1954 he received popular recognition when he produced a series of portraits in which fifty actors performed a representation of Julius Caesar. He also produced a series on acrobats set in the ruins of Arles during the Second World War, as well as another on dead animals. However, it was the series "Nudes at Sea", produced in 1956, which brought him the greatest prestige, as it was an innovation in erotic photography. The following year he illustrated the book "Memorable Bodies" with the poetry of Paul Éluard and shortly afterwards an extensive reportage on the Camargue ecological reserve near his home town. In this series of photographs he worked on the proximity of nature seen in the dimension of the "photographed object". He also dealt with bullfighting themes in his photography and collaborated on films such as Jean Cocteau's "The Testament of Orpheus" and another film about Pablo Picasso.
In 1968 he founded the International Photography Meetings in Arles in collaboration with his friend Michel Tournier and the historian Jean-Maurice Rouquette, which offered an overview of photographic work on an international level and for which he held the post of artistic director for 25 years. From 1976 he taught at the University of Provence and was also a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York.
He has exhibited widely and his work is in collections such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Folkwang Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Ludwig Museum and the Musée Réattu in Arles.
In 2000 he was awarded the Higashikawa Prize in Japan, in 2003 he was made a knight of the Legion of Honour and on 31 May 2006 he was appointed a member of the Academy of Fine Arts when a new section on photography was created, in his opening speech he spoke about the history of photography.