Throckmorton Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibit by one of France’s greatest photographers, Lucien Clergue, with over forty black and white and some color images spanning over fifty years on view, including some of his most iconic nudes from his Zebra series.

Often when you think about Legacy, it’s something that is left behind after a person has passed.  Legacy is more about sharing what you have learned, and Lucien Clergue, with his limitless energy, unending enthusiasm, the love of drama, with a sense of irony, continues to share with us through his work and his mastery of lights.  He brilliantly captured the play of light and shadow, as well as that of the human form, his photography classic, never forced or manipulated.

He photographed many famous subjects, among them protraits of fellow artists, including his dear friend Pablo Picasso, who he met at the age of nineteen.  Photos he took of Provence and postwar ruins led to a five-hour conversation with Picasso in Cannes in 1955.  This meeting resulted in a lifelong friendship until Picasso’s death.  The exhibit offers an opportunity to see together many of his early landscapes, ruins, gypsies, acrobats, harlequins, his famed bullfighters and of course, his renowned nudes!

Lucien was born in 1934 in Arles, France and died in 2014 in Nimes.  Though he was obsessed with learning to play the violin, Clergue took up photophraphy, studying it with utmost discipline and seriousness.  Lucien Clergue had already discovered the power of the camera in his difficult adolescence after witnessing the destruction of his family’s house by WWII bombs along with the prolonged illness and death of his mother.  His later work turned to organic abstractions of sand and lace and was influenced by mythology, and an adventure of what he called, “the mentality of the Mediterranean man.”

Clergue established himself as one of his generation’s most admired photographers, joining the ranks of another friend, Henri Cartier-Bresson.  Clergue was well liked by his peers; he cared about art and worked tirelessly to promote the arts in France, especially fine photography.  In 1968, Clergue, working with Michel Tournier, founded Les Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, which is held annually every July in Arles and this year marks it’s 50th Anniversary.