Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Lucien Clergue: Fifty Years of Photography-Vintage and Recent Works, an extensive retrospective of the work and career of renowned French photographer Lucien Clergue.
Though long known as one of France’s most internationally distinguished and revered photographers, Lucien Clergue is finally getting his richly deserved accolades in the US. After being awarded the prestigious Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art Photography this past fall, the artist returns, this time to the West Coast, to oversee the installation of his first exhibition at Louis Stern Fine Arts.
The exhibition will highlight Clergue’s meticulous use and development of the photographic medium as a most iconoclastic creative endeavor. Throughout his life, Clergue has used the camera to communicate his passions, his adventures and his sensibilities. Whether tracking the poignant lives of Gypsy nomads, interpreting the beguiling shapes of water and sand or composing heart-stoppingly evocative nudes, Clergue followed his own particular muse, remaining a steadfastly independent eye and an artist’s artist.
His wide-ranging associations with an international community of artists took him from movie sets (Jean Cocteau was one of his first employers) to publishing houses (he created imagery for the poetry of Frederico Garcia Lorca) and artist’s studios (his images of Picasso are internationally renowned). His elegant, sensual and deeply humane images helped re-define how we saw the world in the latter half of the Twentieth Century.