renée perle*

i have created a tribute myspace page for the stunning renée perle, muse to the photographer jacques henri lartigue. please stop by and add her.

http://www.myspace.com/reneeperle


Renée Perle
(...-1977) Artist
Born in Romania, date and place unknown; died in the South of France in 1977.

Renée Perle, a Romanian Jewish girl who moved to Paris, is famous as the first muse of the famous French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986), who is considered one of the leading photographers of the 20th century. Renée lived with Lartigue as his girlfriend, having met him in 1929 or 1930 on the Rue de la Pompe. He thought she was Mexican, but he guessed wrong; Perle was Romanian, and a model once employed by the French dressmaker Doeuillet. "She is beautiful," Lartigue told his diary. "The small mouth with the full painted lips! The ebony black eyes. From under her fur coat comes a warmth of perfume. The head looks petite on her long neck." The pair spent two years together, cavorting as if on eternal vacation in Cannes, Juan-les-Pins, and Biarritz, with Lartigue's camera always at the ready. In the "shadowless heaven" of his photographs, glamorous women, including his first and second wives, Bibi and Florette, abound, but Perle's lacquered hair, slender silhouette, modern T-shirts, armfuls of bangles, and talonlike nails shone the brightest. "Around her," Lartigue wrote, "I see a halo of magic." Her spectacular beauty inspired some of his best photographs. Renée also painted, and a large number of her quaint and naive self-portraits are seen in some Lartigue photos. They do not show much mastery of artistic technique, but they have a strange fascination, perhaps because they show something approaching a manic-compulsion by Renée to paint her own face on canvas over and over, almost without end. There have been many efforts to find one of these portraits, as a specimen, but so far with no success. Renée's step-daughter has an oil portrait of her step-mother, but everything else which had been carefully preserved by Renée was dispersed in 2000 and 2001 in two famous Paris sales by Tajan.



Half past five at the Embassy. I wait for my "parasol" from last night. I need a whisky. I'm very shy deep down, and ready to be furious if she doesn't show up. It's my curiosity that would be most disappointed..
Five thirty-five. There she is! Can it really be her? Ravishing, tall, slim, with a small mouth and full lips, and dark porcelain eyes. She casts aside her fur coat in a gust of warm perfume. We're going to dance. Mexican? Cuban? Her very small head sits on a very long neck. She is tall; her mouth is at the level of my chin. When we dance my mouth is not far from her mouth. Her hair brushes against both.
"Romanian. My name is Renée P... I was a model at Doeuillet..." Delicious. She takes off her gloves. Long, little girl's hands. Something in my mind starts dancing at the thought that one day perhaps she would agree to paint the nails of those hands…
~*~*~*JHL-
Diary, Paris, March 7, 1930.

...on hiatus...

Miroslav Tichý*

Tichý is truly one of the great ‘finds’ of an unknown artists who worked on the outside edges of the art world. Following the communist takeover Tichý spent some eight years in prison camps and jails for no particular reason other than he was ‘different’ and was considered subversive. Upon his release in the early 70’s, Tichý wandered his small town in rags, pursuing his obsession as an artist with the female form by photographing in the streets, shops and parks with cameras he made from tin cans, childrens spectacle lenses and other junk he found on the street. He would return home each day to make prints on equally primitive equipment, making only one print from the negatives he selected.

He stole intimate glimpses of his subjects through windows and the fences of swimming pools as well as in the streets, sometimes finding himself in trouble with the police. He would often draw intricately on each print in pencil embellishing the images with his lines or reworking them in other ways, Tichý would also sometimes include a card frame around the prints and decorate those too.

The work which might to the casual viewer, simply appear to be intrusive voyeurism, takes on a melancholic and poetic quality. They are exquisitely produced small objects of obsession, which have no equal. He produced work - not for others, but solely for himself without any regard for exhibiting or selling the work to others.

Tichý was born in 1926 in what is now the Czech Republic and studied painting at the Academy of Art in Prague until his arrest. (photoshop news)

more:
bio on cirkusworld.com
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nico, 1960 by mike shaw.