Jean-François Bauret

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris

Jean-François Bauret (1932-2014) is one of the best-known French photographers of his generation. He is remembered above all for his nudes and his work in advertising. Whether responding to commissions or pursuing his own personal research, he employed spare compositions, showing bodies in a direct manner and playing on the contrasts of black and white. He is notably the author of a male nude as well as photographs of pregnant women that were considered provocative at the time. At the outset of his career, from 1959 onward, he also photographed numerous artists, whether famous or unknown to the general public, at their homes or in their studios. In doing so, he captured moments of intimacy with the same sense of composition and the same desire to show "the individual as he is." Some portraits reflect more pronounced formal explorations, as in the series devoted to the painter Geneviève Asse, while in others, it is the brushes or palettes that stand in for the artist and embody them. The portraits presented in this room all depict artists at least one of whose works is held in the collections of the musée d'Art Moderne de Paris. Jean-François Bauret's work was first presented at the musée d'Art Moderne de Paris in 1971 during a monographic exhibition organized by the ARC section (Animation – Recherche – Confrontation). The current display follows the generous donation to the museum by Madame Claude Bauret Allard, in 2017, of 80 prints.

Source: Paris Open Data ↗