William Claxton Portrait Photography

Lucien Clergue (FRENCH, 1934 - 2014) Gelatin silver photographic print depicting Pablo Picasso titled "Mougins". Jacqueline et Pablo Picasso écoutant Manitas de Plata, circa 1968. Hand signed by the artist with hand written description. Titled and dated lower left. Mounted in a silver painted wooden frame with mat behind acrylic screen. Paper measures approx. 9" height x 11 1/2" width to sight. Framed measures approx. 14 3/4" height x 17 1/4" width. Lucien Clergue (French: 1934 – 2014) was a French photographer. He was Chairman of the Academy of Fine Arts, Paris for 2013. Lucien Clergue was born in Arles, France. At the age of 7 he began learning to play the violin, and after several years of study his teacher admitted that he had nothing more to teach him. Clergue was from a family of shopkeepers and could not afford to pursue further studies in a college or university school of music, such as a conservatory. In 1949, he learned the basics of photography. Four years later, at a corrida in Arles, he showed his photographs to Spanish painter Pablo Picasso who, though subdued, asked to see more of his work. Within a year and a half, young Clergue worked on his photography with the goal of sending more images to Picasso. During this period, he worked on a series of photographs of travelling entertainers, acrobats and harlequins, the Saltimbanques. He also worked on a series whose subject was carrion. On 4 November 1955 Lucien Clergue visited Picasso in Cannes, France. Their friendship lasted nearly 30 years until Picasso's death. Clergue's autobiographical book, Picasso My Friend, looks back on important moments of their relationship. In 1968, and with his friend Michel Tournier, Clergue founded the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival which is held annually in July in Arles. He exhibited his work at the festival during the years 1971–1973, 1975, 1979, 1982–1986, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1994, 2000, 2003 and 2007. Clergue also illustrated books, among them a book by writer Yves Navarre. Clergue took many photographs of the gypsies of southern France, and was instrumental in propelling the guitarist Manitas de Plata to fame. Clergue is perhaps most remembered and respected for his vintage black-and-white studies of light, shadow, and form, featuring sinuous nude female bodies, zebra stripes of light, dynamic sand dunes, and seascapes extracted from the coast of the Camargue. Clergue's photographs are in the collections of numerous well-known museums and private collectors. His vintage photographs have been exhibited in over 100 solo exhibitions worldwide, with noted exhibitions such as in 1961, at the Museum of Modern Art New York, the last exhibition organized by Edward Steichen with Lucien Clergue, Bill Brandt and Yasuhiro Ishimoto. Museums with large collections of his work include The Fogg Museum at Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His work, Fontaines du Grand Palais (Fountains of the Grand Palais), is in Museo cantonale d'arte [de] of Lugano. His photographs of Jean Cocteau are on permanent display at the Jean Cocteau Museum in Menton, France. In the U.S., an exhibition of the Cocteau photographs was premiered at Westwood Gallery, New York City. In 2007, the city of Arles honored Lucien Clergue and dedicated a retrospective collection of 360 of his photographs dating from 1953 to 2007. He also received the 2007 Lucie Award. He was named Knight of the Légion d'honneur in 2003 and elected member of the Academy of Fine Arts of the Institute of France on 31 May 2006, at the same time as a new section dedicated to photography was created. Clergue was the first photographer to enter the Academy to a position devoted specifically to photography. He was Chairman of the Academy of Fine Arts for 2013. Lucien Clergue was married to the art curator Yolande Clergue, founder of The Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles. He was the father of two daughters: Anne Clergue, a curator of contemporary art who has worked at Leo Castelli Gallery, and Olivia Clergue, a handbag fashion designer whose godfather was Pablo Picasso. Pablo Picasso (1881 –1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramic artist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a dramatic portrayal of the bombing of Guernica by German and Italian air forces during the Spanish Civil War. After 1906, the Fauvist work of the slightly older artist Henri Matisse motivated Picasso to explore more radical styles, beginning a fruitful rivalry between the two artists, who subsequently were often paired by critics as the leaders of modern art. In 1897, his realism began to show a Symbolist influence, for example, in a series of landscape...

John Albok Untitled (Barefoot Woman on Bench with Cat), 1938 Vintage gelatin silver print, 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. Signed and dated in ink on mount margin by John Albok Born in Munkacs, H...

Elsa Peretti was born in Florence, studied interior design and was a language teacher and ski instructor before becoming a model. Peretti settled in New York in 1968 and began a care...

Dinner Jazz American Jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong enjoys a plate of spaghetti in Rome. Slim Aarons silver gelatine fibre based print Print...

Anthony Perkins was the son of the distinguished Broadway actor Osgood Perkins. He won an Academy Award nomination in just his second film, Friendly Persuasion (1956). In 1960, he appeared as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Psycho, and from then on, Perkins was strongly identified with that one role. When photographed by Jack Robinson on May 21, 1968, Perkins had just made Pretty Poison playing a mentally disturbed man opposite Tuesday Weld. He was married to the photographer Berry Berenson...

Silver Gelatine Print by Erich Andres, ca 1950. Andres was born 1905 in Germany and passed away 1992. He started his career as a photographer in 1920. He was one of the first photogr...

Silver Gelatine Print by Erich Andres, ca 1950. Andres was born 1905 in Germany and passed away 1992. He started his career as a photographer in 1920. He was one of the first photogr...

Dirk Bogarde had, by the time Jack Robinson photographed him on January 17, 1968, survived a long period as the pin-up idol of postwar British cinema to b...

Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, born in Parma and the son of poets, was himself a published poet at the age of eighteen. He moved into films at twenty as an assistant director to Pier Paolo Pasolini, himself a poet turned filmmaker. When Jack Robinson photographed the twenty-eight year old Bertolucci on April 12, 1969, he had not yet started filming on The Conformist (1970) featuring the actors Jean-Louis Trintignant and Dominique Sanda. In Vogue, Bertolucci is described as “a shy man who moves the way he speaks and smiles, gently but cautiously, with sleepy brown eyes on the lookout for the worst”. As a filmmaker, he would achieve notoriety for Last Tango in Paris...

Silver Gelatine Print by Erich Andres, ca 1950. Andres was born 1905 in Germany and passed away 1992. He started his career as a photographer in 1920. He was one of the first photogr...

Silver Gelatine Print by Erich Andres, ca 1950. Andres was born 1905 in Germany and passed away 1992. He started his career as a photographer in 1920. He was one of the first photogr...

Silver Gelatine Print by Erich Andres, ca 1950. Andres was born 1905 in Germany and passed away 1992. He started his career as a photographer in 1920. He was one of the first photogr...