{"id":91232,"date":"2025-08-18T06:33:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T06:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/91232\/"},"modified":"2025-08-18T06:33:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T06:33:11","slug":"agnes-vardas-photographic-odes-to-queer-paris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/91232\/","title":{"rendered":"Agn\u00e8s Varda\u2019s Photographic Odes to Queer Paris"},"content":{"rendered":"

PARIS \u2014 The bowl cut, the cats, the heart-shaped potatoes. The predilection for loopy plots and faces hidden in household objects. Whether posing with angel wings or swallowed by a giant Muppet-like coat, the late artist and filmmaker Agn\u00e8s Varda (1928\u20132019) has long been a patron saint of the unabashedly eccentric<\/a>. A master of self-invention, she crafted a persona as singular as those she shot for the screen.<\/p>\n

Fittingly, Agn\u00e8s Varda\u2019s Paris, from here to there<\/a>, at the Mus\u00e9e Carnavalet till August 24, plumbs Varda\u2019s enduring fascination with performance. \u201cI like that artists disguise, mask, and deform reality,\u201d she is quoted on a gallery wall. Featuring 130 photographic prints, film excerpts, and an eclectic array of her personal effects in, the exhibition honors the artist\u2019s waggish sensibility, my personal favorite being a photo of a human face found in a bath faucet. But more urgently, the show reveals how Varda\u2019s creative vision not only \u201cmasked\u201d the real world, but was inspired by her lived reality \u2014 as a Brussels-born bohemian building a career in the big city, a trailblazing New Wave auteur, a vocal radical feminist, and, perhaps most surprisingly, a queer artist whose interest in gender fluidity was reflected in her early photographic portraits.<\/p>\n

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\t\tVarda\u2019s photos of Valentine Schlegel in the studio in 1952, on view in from here to there (photo Eileen G\u2019Sell\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n

Many devotees are familiar with Varda\u2019s marriage to acclaimed filmmaker Jacques Demy, whose bisexuality was revealed after his death from AIDS-related complications in 1990. Fewer are aware that, years earlier, she shared a life, home, and creative practice with French sculptor and ceramist Valentine Schlegel. In 1951, three miles from the stately manses that abut the Carnavalet today, Varda and Schlegel moved into two neglected boutiques on 86 Rue Daguerre in Montparnasse. In line with the street\u2019s namesake (photographer Louis Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype), Varda and Schlegel transformed one of the buildings into a photography laboratory, the other into a ceramics studio. At the home\u2019s entrance, an orange plaque designed by Schlegel featured Varda in her signature coif.<\/p>\n

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\t\t1955 photo by Varda of a friend wearing angel wings, on view in from here to there (photo Eileen G\u2019Sell\/Hyperallergic)<\/p>\n

In one of Varda\u2019s earliest portraits on display in the exhibition, from 1947, Schlegel dons a drawn-on mustache in front of a painter\u2019s canvas, drolly parroting the self-serious nature of the male modernist artist. In another taken a few years later, Schlegel and sister, the ceramist Fr\u00e9d\u00e9rique Bourguet, pose in sober silhouette on the steps of Montmartre. In a 1954 series of Schlegel, she dons androgynous attire while straddling a stool and a bench. On the occasion of Schlegel\u2019s 30th birthday in 1955, Varda captured a male friend posing shirtless in gilded angel wings, coyly smiling with his arms crossing his bare chest.<\/p>\n

While the wall signage and object labels steer clear of didacticism, fans of Varda\u2019s later work \u2014\u00a0 her 1962 masterpiece Cl\u00e9o from 5 to 7, her 1977 abortion-rights musical One Sings, the Other Doesn\u2019t<\/a>, or her collaborations with cinematic luminaries like Jane Birkin \u2014 might be delighted witness just how free-wheeling and queer the artist\u2019s social circle was during the late \u201940s and early \u201950s, one of the most homophobic periods<\/a> in French history. What from here to there implicitly celebrates is not only how Paris influenced a 20th-century icon of film, but how queer culture and merriment played a critical, if often overlooked, role in the artistic communities that brought the very concept of \u201cGay Paree<\/a>\u201d to life.<\/p>\n

Agn\u00e8s Varda\u2019s Paris, from here to there<\/a> continues at the Mus\u00e9e Carnavalet \u2013 Histoire de Paris (23 Rue de S\u00e9vign\u00e9, Paris, France) through August 24. The exhibition was curated by Val\u00e9rie Guillaume, director of the Mus\u00e9e Carnavalet, and Anne de Mondenard, head curator of the Photographs and Digital Images Department of the Mus\u00e9e Carnavalet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PARIS \u2014 The bowl cut, the cats, the heart-shaped potatoes. The predilection for loopy plots and faces hidden…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91233,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[13244,228,226,227,229,88,593,688],"class_list":{"0":"post-91232","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-agnes-varda","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-paris","15":"tag-photography"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91232\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}