Paris. When he was suggested to Anne de Mondenard an appointment with Rosalie Varda-Demy by telling her that she “Had to see what she kept from Agnès Varda in Paris”the chief curator at the Carnavalet museum, proposed to Valérie Guillaume, director of the museum, to accompany her. What the artist’s daughter’s daughter showed that day that was showed that day to schedule an exhibition. For more than two years, Anne de Mondenard has thus carried out research work on this unexplored axis covering more than seventy years of Varda’s life, from her registration at the Louvre school in 1944 to her disappearance in 2019. The meticulous survey carried out in the photo and filmic archives by the historian of photography today leads to a chronological, instructive and rigorous exhibition The work and its various incarnations, in particular that of 86 rue Daguerre, in the 14th arrondissement, where Agnès Varda settled in 1951.
Certainly, since 2023, the Varda exhibitions have been linked: from June 28, the Soulages Museum in Rodez devotes an exhibition to it. If each of them has revealed, narrated by the facets of her personality and her abundant work, the monograph sign Anne de Mondenard, however, retains by her in -depth study rich in detail, unpublished or unknown aspects, regularly returning to the close links between photography and films.
This great precision of the subject is expressed from the first room brought by the story in images and the technical or explanatory cartels, devoted to the early Parisian years of Varda before the installation on rue Daguerre. His roommate quoted Malesherbes, near Pigalle, with three other young women including the ceramist and sculptor Valentine Schlegel, the choice of photographer’s profession after the Louvre school as well as the installation of a laboratory to shoot his photographs in the parents’ apartment at 19 boulevard Raspail, draw from 1944 to 1950 the first traits of an assertive personality.
Installation rue Daguerre
Self -portrait session with Valentine or alone without yet the bowl cut to which she will be identified later, portraits of her other roommates or Vilar children in Montsouris park in June 1948, photographs of the Seine quays and first collective exhibitions with portraits tinged with dark surrealism … This time is embodied through period prints, and explanations on photographs or documents.
Agnès Varda (1928-1919), Self -portrait in his studiorue Daguerre, Paris 14th, 1956.
© Succession Agnès Varda
The purchase by his parents of two poles in pitiful states, separated by an alley courtyard, at 86 rue Daguerre where Agnès Varda and Valentine Schlegel develop their respective apartment and workshops, is told on the same principle with a reconstruction of the Varda studio and the dissemination of connections of the first films of which The short point (1955), seeing Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret Marchand in the courtyard. A courtyard who has become synonymous with living environment, creations, meetings and metamorphoses that reveal extracts of films or documentaries and portraits of his children, Jacques Demy and his loved ones, artists or not.
“I had not measured how important the court had had such a role and place in the creation of Agnès Varda”, underlines Anne de Mondenard who offers, at the end of the course, a captivating montage of all the interviews made of the artist in this court from 1959 to 2019 – to take the time to look to hear him talking about her art and her place as a woman in the cinema. Many of her films evoke the question of the emancipation of women, in the exhibition, including “one sing, the other not” (1976) made in Paris, but also the advertising spot of information on contraception, unknown, that the Ministry of Women’s Rights commanded him in 1981, which she turns for a part in her neighborhood, and which broadcasts the newspaper of France 2, then animated by Christine Ockrent!
Agnès Varda has photographed a lot and filmed near her home and in the places she likes in Paris, favoring the ordinary, the margin, the dispute. The juxtaposition of extracts of feature films or documentaries shot in the city, or even unfinished, with a map of the capital indicating each time for each of them by a light point for filming, is particularly eloquent as the focus on Opera-Mouffe (1958), Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) or Daguerreotypes (1975).
