Lucien Clergue: Written by the Sun

Lucien Clergue: Written by the Sun
Sep 23, 2026 – Oct 24, 2026

United States United States — Art Gallery
555 W 25th St, 3rd floor
New York, NY 10001

Mouraux Durand-Ruel Gallery opens its Chelsea space with Lucien Clergue: Written by the Sun, on view from 23 September through 24 October 2026, presenting forty black-and-white photographs made from the 1950s to the early 2000s. The retrospective traces the different worlds through which Clergue constructed his photographic language: theater and memory, music and community, the effect of light and poetry on the human body. The exhibition takes its title from the Mediterranean light that shaped his vision from early Saltimbanques and Gypsies pictures to the architectural series Brasília, his celebrated nude photographs, and intimate portraits of Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau.

Born in Arles in 1934, Clergue received his first camera at thirteen. At nineteen, he met Picasso at a bullfight in the Roman arena of Arles, showing the painter his photographs after the corrida. Over the next two decades, Clergue photographed Picasso from the villa La Californie in Cannes to Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, where he made his final portrait in 1971. These images reveal the artist at work, at rest, and in moments of quiet intimacy, reflecting the trust that existed between the two men. Picasso considered Clergue a greater photographer than Henri Cartier-Bresson, once remarking that his photographs were "the good Lord's sketch books."

Among the earliest works are the Saltimbanques, begun in 1954. Fascinated by theater, Clergue staged children as Harlequins, Pierrots, violinists, and circus performers among the ruins of postwar Arles, creating poetic tableaux shaped by memory and loss. The following year, he turned to the Gypsies, photographing families from the community with unusual intimacy. He resisted presenting their lives primarily through hardship, focusing instead on movement: dance, music, rituals. "Gypsies are people to whom the present only exists," he later wrote.

These photographs led to friendship with Jean Cocteau, whom Picasso introduced to Clergue in 1956. Cocteau described him as a "poet photographer." In 1959, he invited Clergue to photograph the making of his final film, Le Testament d'Orphée, giving him complete freedom to interpret what he saw. Portraits of Cocteau directing coexist with theatrical visions of mythological characters.

A radically different landscape appears in Brasília, captured in 1963. Clergue depicted the newly created capital through Oscar Niemeyer's monumental architecture, recognizing in the curves and volumes a language close to his own treatment of the female body. Very few lifetime prints from this series exist; Clergue printed them the last year of his life.

The dialogue between body, landscape, and light lies at the heart of Clergue's iconic Nudes of the Sea. Photographed along the shores of the Camargue, these close-up images transform the female body into an elemental landscape. Edward Steichen acquired nine prints for the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, inviting Clergue to exhibit in Diogenes with a Camera V the following year. His later Zebra Nudes shift into urban interiors, using Venetian blinds to fragment and reconstruct the figure with bands of light and shadow.

Clergue was the first photographer elected to France's Académie des Beaux-Arts and co-founded the Rencontres d'Arles in 1969 with Jean-Maurice Rouquette and Michel Tournier. He died in 2014 at age 80. The exhibition is organized in close collaboration with Anne Clergue, the artist's daughter, who directs the Atelier Lucien Clergue in Arles.

Image: Manitas de Plata joue pour Picasso, Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins, 1955. Manitas de Plata Plays for Picasso, Notre-Dame-de-Vie, Mougins


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