Exhibition at the museum

Céline Laguarde (1873-1961) Photographer

From September 24th, 2024 to January 12th, 2025 -

Musée d'Orsay

Temporary Exhibition Area
Seine Gallery, level 0

In the early years of the 20th century, Céline Laguarde established herself as an international figure in the history of photography’s first artistic movement: pictorialism. Her body of work has finally emerged from a century of oblivion. This exhibition is an invitation to rediscover Laguarde on two levels: as a female photographer who earned a level of recognition that no woman in France had achieved since the invention of the medium, but also - and most importantly - as an artist who in her lifetime was already considered to be one of the most important photographers of her era.

The exhibition has been made possible by the gradual unveiling of the artist's personal collection, which was pieced back together in the Musée d’Orsay collections between 2017 and 2024. His main ambition is to spotlight a body of work of unsuspected quality, variety and longevity. The portraits, studies of figures, and landscapes give an insight into the photographer's reputation as a master of pigment processes, still considered today to be among the most complex and sophisticated printing techniques.

Through more than a hundred and thirty of the artist’s original prints, selectively compared with photographs by her male and female contemporaries, the exhibition also showcases the evolutions and continuities, influences and dialogues, and originality and specificities that characterize Laguarde’s work.

The result of an exceptional research process, this exhibition and the accompanying publication - the first to be dedicated to the artist - are based on piecing together Céline Laguarde's work, biography, career, and critical success. This personal journey is also put into a threefold context: that of a particularly eclectic network of artistic, literary, musical, and scientific social connections; of the regional, national, and international fine art photography scene; and the still little-known world of French female photographers at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, examined here for the first time.

With a fresh perspective on Pictorialism, this retrospective is the first to be dedicated to Céline Laguarde, as well as the first to be dedicated to a French female fine art photographer who was active before the First World War.