PARIS — The bowl minimize, 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 a large 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 right 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 true world, however was impressed by her lived actuality — as a Brussels-born bohemian constructing a profession within the massive 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 conversant in Varda’s marriage to acclaimed filmmaker Jacques Demy, whose bisexuality was revealed after his dying from AIDS-related problems in 1990. Fewer are conscious that, years earlier, she shared a life, dwelling, and inventive follow with French sculptor and ceramist Valentine Schlegel. In 1951, three miles from the stately manses that abut the Carnavalet at this time, Varda and Schlegel moved into two uncared for boutiques on 86 Rue Daguerre in Montparnasse. Consistent with the road’s namesake (photographer Louis Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype), Varda and Schlegel reworked one of many buildings right into a pictures laboratory, the opposite right into a ceramics studio. On the dwelling’s entrance, an orange plaque designed by Schlegel featured Varda in her signature coif.
In one in every of 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 pal posing shirtless in gilded angel wings, coyly smiling together 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 Different Doesn’t, or her collaborations with cinematic luminaries like Jane Birkin — is perhaps delighted witness simply how free-wheeling and queer the artist’s social circle was through the late ’40s and early ’50s, some of the homophobic durations 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 important, if typically ignored, function within the inventive communities that introduced the very idea of “Homosexual Paree” to life.
Agnès Varda’s Paris, from right here to there continues on the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris (23 Rue de Sévigné, Paris, France) by 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 Photos Division of the Musée Carnavalet.
