Richard Avedon
Photographs 1946 – 2004
Virginie Yassef
The Second Stated First
July 1 – September 28, 2008
1, place de la Concorde
75008 PARIS
France
The Jeu de Paume presents this summer the first major retrospective of Richard Avedon’s work in France since his death in 2004. The exhibition brings together some 250 photographs spanning his entire career, including a large selection of prints from his famous In the American West series.
Richard Avedon, Photographs 1946 – 2004
Richard Avedon, fashion photographer
In 1945, Richard Avedon started working for Harper’s Bazaar, for which he soon became head photographer – a position he kept until 1966, when he moved to Vogue. His lively and passionate eye transformed fashion photography from something monotonous and stiff to something dynamic and entirely innovative for its times, by emphasizing movement and capturing his models in public spaces such as parks, nightclubs and shops. Avedon set out to recreate everyday and social situations, and to give the impression that his photographs were taken spontaneously.
Richard Avedon, portraitist
Richard Avedon also made numerous portraits, radically transforming the codes of genre, as did that other great American photographer, Irving Penn.
But Avedon went even further than Penn. He shattered the iconic images of the stars of show business, literature, the arts and the political elite in the United States. His portraits show all the facets of his models’ personality, however great their mastery of the codes of representation.
In the American West
Between 1979 and 1984, Avedon travelled across the western part of the United States, which was suffering from the effects of a serious economic recession. His idea was to bring outsiders and disadvantaged people into the tradition of the portrait. All the photos in the In the American West series were taken in broad daylight and outdoors, against a simple white paper backdrop hung on the side of a truck. What resulted were uncompromising images in which Avedon was able to depict the daily struggle to survive and the decline of a system of values traditionally associated with the American West.
Exhibition organised by the Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk (Denmark) and the Jeu de Paume, Paris, with the cooperation of the Richard Avedon Foundation, New York and the support of the Manufacture
Jaeger-LeCoultre.
“Avedon” / Talk by Bernard Blistène, art critic and curator.
Friday 4 July at 7 pm
Registration: +33 (0)1 47 03 12 41 / serviceculturel@jeudepaume.org
Richard Avedon. Photographs 1946 – 2004
Tuesday 1 July at 7 pm
Tour of the exhibition with Norma Stevens, director of The Richard Avedon Foundation, and Marta Gili, director of the Jeu de Paume.
”Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light” (Helen Whitney, 1995, 87’, colour and black and white, in English with French subtitles)
Tuesday to Sunday at 12.30 pm, 2 pm, 3.30 pm, 5 pm
Funny Face (Stanley Donen, 1957, 103’, color, in English with French subtitles).
Tuesday 8 July at 7 pm
Film introduced by Bernard Bénoliel, from the Cinémathèque Française.
Virginie Yassef: The Second Started First
The fourth and last part of “Playgrounds,” the Satellite programme curated by Fabienne Fulchéri, is dedicated to Virginie Yassef, a French artist born in 1970. In her project for the Jeu de Paume, she questions the role of the body in the exhibition space, through video, sculptures and installations. In collaboration with visual artists and a composer, she experiments with stage design collaboration, by questioning the ambiguous relations between high art and popular art, the logic of mass production and artistic creation.
Exhibition organized with the support of the Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques
The Jeu de Paume receives a subsidy from the Ministry of Culture and Communication.
It gratefully acknowledges support from Neuflize Vie, its global partner.
Information : +33 (0)1 47 03 12 50
Tuesday : noon – 9 pm
Wednesday to Friday : noon – 7 pm
Saturday and Sunday : 10 am – 7 pm
