PARIS — The bowl reduce, the cats, the heart-shaped potatoes. The predilection for crazy plots and faces hidden in family objects. Whether or not posing with angel wings or swallowed by an enormous Muppet-like coat, the late artist and filmmaker Agnès Varda (1928–2019) has lengthy been a patron saint of the unabashedly eccentric. A grasp of self-invention, she crafted a persona as singular as these she shot for the display.
Fittingly, Agnès Varda’s Paris, from here to there, on the Musée Carnavalet until August 24, plumbs Varda’s enduring fascination with efficiency. “I like that artists disguise, masks, and deform actuality,” she is quoted on a gallery wall. That includes 130 photographic prints, movie excerpts, and an eclectic array of her private results in, the exhibition honors the artist’s waggish sensibility, my private favourite being a photograph of a human face present in a shower faucet. However extra urgently, the present reveals how Varda’s artistic imaginative and prescient not solely “masked” the actual world, however was impressed by her lived actuality — as a Brussels-born bohemian constructing a profession within the large metropolis, a trailblazing New Wave auteur, a vocal radical feminist, and, maybe most surprisingly, a queer artist whose curiosity in gender fluidity was mirrored in her early photographic portraits.
Many devotees are accustomed to Varda’s marriage to acclaimed filmmaker Jacques Demy, whose bisexuality was revealed after his demise from AIDS-related problems in 1990. Fewer are conscious that, years earlier, she shared a life, residence, and artistic apply with French sculptor and ceramist Valentine Schlegel. In 1951, three miles from the stately manses that abut the Carnavalet at present, Varda and Schlegel moved into two uncared for boutiques on 86 Rue Daguerre in Montparnasse. In keeping with the road’s namesake (photographer Louis Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype), Varda and Schlegel remodeled one of many buildings right into a images laboratory, the opposite right into a ceramics studio. On the residence’s entrance, an orange plaque designed by Schlegel featured Varda in her signature coif.
In one among Varda’s earliest portraits on show within the exhibition, from 1947, Schlegel dons a drawn-on mustache in entrance of a painter’s canvas, drolly parroting the self-serious nature of the male modernist artist. In one other taken a number of years later, Schlegel and sister, the ceramist Frédérique Bourguet, pose in sober silhouette on the steps of Montmartre. In a 1954 sequence of Schlegel, she dons androgynous apparel whereas straddling a stool and a bench. On the event of Schlegel’s thirtieth birthday in 1955, Varda captured a male good friend posing shirtless in gilded angel wings, coyly smiling along with his arms crossing his naked chest.
Whereas the wall signage and object labels keep away from didacticism, followers of Varda’s later work — her 1962 masterpiece Cléo from 5 to 7, her 1977 abortion-rights musical One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, or her collaborations with cinematic luminaries like Jane Birkin — is likely to be delighted to witness simply how free-wheeling and queer the artist’s social circle was through the late ’40s and early ’50s, probably the most homophobic periods in French historical past. What from right here to there implicitly celebrates isn’t solely how Paris influenced a Twentieth-century icon of movie, however how queer tradition and merriment performed a essential, if usually ignored, function within the creative communities that introduced the very idea of “Gay Paree” to life.
Agnès Varda’s Paris, from here to there continues on the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris (23 Rue de Sévigné, Paris, France) by way of August 24. The exhibition was curated by Valérie Guillaume, director of the Musée Carnavalet, and Anne de Mondenard, head curator of the Images and Digital Photographs Division of the Musée Carnavalet.
