At the beginning of the 20thth century, Celine Laguarde established herself as an international figure in the first artistic movement in the history of photography, pictorialism. His work today emerges from a century of oblivion. The rediscovery to which the exhibition invites is twofold: that of a personality having reached a degree of recognition then unique and unprecedented in France in the case of a woman photographer, but also, and above all, that of an artist already considered, during his lifetime, among the major photographers of his time.
The primary ambition of the exhibition is to reveal a work of unsuspected quality, variety and longevity. One hundred and thirty original prints make it possible to measure the virtuoso reputation acquired by the photographer in the field of non-silver “art processes”, still considered today among the most complex and sophisticated printing techniques (pigment processes using bichromated gum and oily inks).
Bringing together portraits, studies of models, compositions of symbolist inspiration and landscapes, the selection – occasionally compared with photographs of male and female contemporaries – also shows the evolutions and permanences, the influences and dialogues but also the originality and the specificities that characterize the work of Céline Laguarde.
The result of new research, the exhibition is built on a reconstruction of the corpus, biography, career and critical fortunes of Céline Laguarde. This individual trajectory is placed in a triple context: that of a singularly eclectic network of artistic, literary, musical and scientific sociabilities; that, regional, national and international, of art photography; that, still largely unknown, of female photography in France at the turn of the 19th centurye and 20e centuries.
The event marks the commitment of the Musée d'Orsay to the work of recomposition and preservation, within the national collections, of Céline Laguarde's unpublished personal collection. At the end of several acquisition campaigns carried out between 2017 and 2024, the institution retains the only representative collection of the work of this photographer. Bringing together more than 200 pieces, it is among the best preserved monographic collections of pictorialist artists in the world.
The exhibition Céline Laguarde Photographer (1873-1961) finally continues a valorization project started by the Musée d'Orsay in 2015. The exhibition Who is afraid of women photographers? 1839-1919 was then the first, in France, to address the phenomenon of women photographers in the 19th centurye century and early 20the century. Rediscovered on this occasion, the first part of Céline Laguarde's unpublished collection allowed her to be represented among seventy-five British, American and French practitioners. The fall 2024 retrospective is not only the first dedicated to Céline Laguarde but also the first dedicated to a photographer artist active in France before the First World War.
Commissariat
Thomas Galifot, chief curator for photography, Musée d'Orsay
Céline Laguarde Photographer (1873-1961)
Until January 12, 2025
Orsay Museum
Esplanade Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
75007 Paris, France
https://www.musee-orsay.fr
