Photography: Jacques Henri Lartigue devoted himself to having a good time and, luckily for us, to recording it in pictures, writes John Banville.
The images the publishers have chosen for the jacket of this selection from the 130 albums of photographs and writings which Jacques Henri Lartigue assembled over his lifetime are oddly unrepresentative of the artist's work. The front photograph, recording the reactions of three male passers-by to a woman in hot pants on a London street in 1967, might have been taken by Robert Doisneau on a good day or Cartier-Bresson on a not so good. The montage on the back cover, of scenes from the 1939 Bastille Day parade in Paris, would have been done much better by Robert Capa or Lee Miller. Lartigue was neither a recorder of twee scenes of street life, like Doisneau, nor a photo-journalist such as Cartier-Bresson or Capa. Lartigue's subject was happiness and how to achieve it and, having achieved it, how to hold on to it, in defiance of everything. Rarely has the ruthlessness of the pure sybarite been so amply illustrated.
Jacques Henri Lartigue was born in 1894, the second of two sons, into one of the wealthiest French families of the day. His father was the director of a railway company and, for a time, the editor of L'Express France. Lartigue père was a remarkably loving, protective and tolerant father who spoilt his sons rotten. As a child Jacques Henri was sickly and neurasthenic, but, or, perhaps, therefore, was possessed of a great talent for happiness. Throughout his long life - despite those early weaknesses he lived well into his 90s - he devoted the main part of his energies to having a good time. Having it, and, almost as importantly, recording it. At the age of 13 he wrote in his diary: "Every lovely, strange, bizarre or interesting thing gives me such pleasure I'm delirious with joy! . . . \ I can remember much of it, thanks to photography!" The word that inevitably springs to mind to describe Lartigue's childhood is Proustian. In 1905, at the age of 11, he recorded: "When Mother said to me: 'You'll always be my little baby', nothing can express the gentleness in her voice and eyes. How I would always like to hear her saying that! I remember, when I was small . . . that other happiness that enveloped me in the evening as I was going to sleep, I dreaded feeling her leaving." Like Proust too, however, Lartigue was acutely aware of the evanescence of life and its loveliness. In 1912, at the age of 18, he recorded an autumnal note: "When the leaves fall (it happens in October, at the time of year when tuberculosis patients die). Sad . . ."
Lartigue was six when his doting father gave him the present of a camera. The child was immediately captivated by this magical toy - "I'm going to be able to photograph everything. Everything, everything . . ." - the perfect recording tool for a being obsessed with the moment and its brevity. In a sense, however, he was already a photographer. In a journal entry, surely edited and elaborated upon by the adult Lartigue, the child wrote in 1900 of his invention of the "'eye-trap': . . . Suddenly this morning an idea began to dance around in my head, a fairytale invention, thanks to which I will never again be bored or sad: I open my eyes, shut them, open them again, then open them wide and hey presto! I capture the image, everything: the colours! the right size! And what I keep is moving smelling living life."
The object was to record the eye-trap images on paper, with coloured crayons, for Lartigue thought of himself primarily as a painter, just as his colleague, Cartier- Bresson, considers himself a graphic artist first and a photographer a far second.
Lartigue's paintings, however, like Cartier-Bresson's drawings, are of indifferent quality, at best.
Probably Lartigue did not expect to live long. Martine d'Astier, in her essay 'The Autobiographical Enterprise: The Invention of Heaven', included in Lartigue: Album of a Century, notes that infant mortality was extremely high at the turn of the last century, and no doubt the worries of the Lartigue parents trickled down to the nursery. Yet it would be wrong to think of young Jacques Henri as a milksop. His earliest photographs are all movement, play, flight. The Lartigues came of a long line of amateur inventors, and Jacques Henri and his brother Maurice, nicknamed Zissou, spent much of their childhood - their education was scant, and home-administered - busily building all sorts of ingenious contraptions, especially would-be flying machines. Indeed, Lartigue sold his first professional photograph, in 1911, to an aeroplane magazine.
Lartigue was loath to leave childhood. At the age of 11 he is already worrying about the future: "Now and then, I am full of sadness about growing up. I would like to be able to stay as I am (I feel so happy, so full of happiness, youth, and confidence)." But if he had to be a real, mortal boy, and not Peter Pan, he could nevertheless stay the moment, if only on photographic paper. In the 1920s, on the Riviera, he wrote: "There will always be moments of happiness to seize." Such a moment is seized in what is surely his loveliest single picture, the autochrome study of his wife Bibi - Madeleine Messagér, daughter of the composer André Messagér - seated in morning sunlight at their table in the Eden Roc Hotel at Cap d'Antibes in May, 1920. Here is all the sad happiness of summer and the south.
There were numerous Lartigue women, and all of them were photogenic, even when enthroned on the lavatory, as Bibi is in a snapshot Lartigue took when they were on honeymoon together in Switzerland in 1920. The most ravishing of all his beauties, however, is the Romanian Renée Perle, whom he met in Paris in 1930, and who was for two years his lover and the subject of countless photographs and paintings.
A pretty myth has grown up around Lartigue's "discovery" as a great photographer in the 1960s, a myth which Lartigue did nothing to dispel, to say the least. As the story goes, Lartigue, who was then nearly 70, and his third wife, Florette, sailed by cargo ship to Los Angeles to visit friends there. On the journey, Florette, a quarter-century younger than her husband, passed the time by putting into order a pile of photographs Lartigue had taken in his youth of family members, and of elegant ladies in the Bois de Boulogne - the boy Lartigue had been something of an artistic peeping-tom - which when later they got to New York they showed to Charles Rado, who ran a picture agency in the city. Rado brought some 50 of the photographs, along with two of Lartigue's albums, to John Szarkowski, newly appointed director of the department of photography in the Museum of Modern Art.
"Two hours later," as Lartigue later told it, "I was having lunch with the directors of Life and the Museum of Modern Art."
The MOMA exhibition that followed, and the picture spread in Life magazine, caused a sensation in the ever alert New York art world, and practically overnight Lartigue became a world-renowned artist. As Lartigue put it, with characteristic wryness, "The Tout-New York is talking about nothing but me, and about what? My little photos . . ." The truth was less romantic, as the truth always is, but more interesting, too, as Kevin Moore demonstrates in a shrewd essay printed here, 'The Critical Fortune of Lartigue', which speaks of the "distortions, exaggerations, and embellishments that blanketed the 'oeuvre' from the very beginning".
Szarkowski was not the disinterested mentor he may have seemed. The ambitious new director had been on the lookout for just such a photographer as Lartigue to support his theory that, as Moore puts it, "expressive pictures resulted from ingenuous immersion in real life rather than from art training". Thus was born the myth of Lartigue the inspired amateur and ingenuous vernacular artist. Public and commercial success in the arts is never simple, and rarely pure.
Lartigue was anything but ingenuous. From his earliest years he understood and accepted - indeed, lived by - his compulsion toward happiness, happiness at all costs, and he knew what those costs were. Even when he sought to present himself as a free spirit, a mere dabbler in the game of life, he showed how steely and remote he really was.
"A spectator," he wrote of himself, "who watches without worrying about any contingency, without knowing if what is happening is serious, sad, important, funny or not. A kind of star dweller come down to earth simply to enjoy the show. The spectator for whom everyone, even - above all - me, is a marionette."
In the end, the myth-making is of small consequence; what matters is the work, as this superb volume attests. The world's wonders are pictured here on every page, aglow, shimmering, fleeting. These marionettes move in their stillness, and warm blood rushes in their veins. Yet the sensibility that could capture such sumptuousness was itself, of necessity, cold. At 18 he records in his journal: "This morning at the Eiffel Tower, an inventor, Monsieur Reichelt, a tailor, jumped from the first-floor platform with a parachute he invented. He fell straight down and died. I wasn't there. What a pity for my photographs."
That, for better or worse, is the voice of the true artist.
John Banville's latest book, Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City, is published by Bloomsbury