Lucien Hervé

Exhibition text:

Born in Hungary, Lucien Hervé emigrated to France in 1929 with the intention of becoming a painter. He honed his eye in Europe’s greatest museums and through Expressionist cinema, but it was as a self-taught photographer that he learned his trade. A Communist, then a Resistance fighter, he was a man of convictions, values that he wished to put to good use in his commitment as an artist. In 1949, his encounter with the work of Le Corbusier, and then with the architect himself, turned him definitively towards photography, and architectural photography in particular.

The embodiment of modernism and genius, the architect’s buildings fascinated him, and he sought to capture both their materiality and their intangible aspects. They inspired his desire to become a builder himself in the field of images, using his own tools: light and shadow. He asserted his language right from his first photographs: geometric and often minimalist compositions that tend towards abstraction. They are based on the tension between shapes and volumes, the balance between full and empty, offering an evocation rather than a description of the subjects. Le Corbusier told Hervé that he possessed “the soul of an architect”, and he drew heavily on his photographs to disseminate his architecture.