Jean-François Bauret

Jean-François Bauret (1932-2014) is one of the most renowned French photographers of his generation. He is principally remembered for his nudes and his work for advertising. In his responses to commissions as in his personal investigations, he employs spare compositions, presenting bodies directly and playing with the contrasts of black and white. He is notably the author of a male nude as well as photographs of pregnant women deemed provocative at the time.

At the start of his career, from 1959 onward, he also photographed numerous artists, famous or still unknown to the general public, at their homes or in their studios. He thus captures intimate moments with the same sense of composition and the same will to show “the individual as he is.”

Some portraits translate more assertive formal explorations, as in the series devoted to the painter Geneviève Asse, while in other cases it is the brushes or palettes that substitute for the artist and embody him. The portraits presented in this room all depict artists whose at least one work is held in the collections of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.

Bauret’s work was presented for the first time at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in 1971 in a monographic exhibition organized by the ARC section (Animation – Research – Confrontation).

The current hanging follows the generous donation to the museum by Mrs. Claude Bauret Allard, in 2017, of 80 prints.