The late artist and filmmaker Agnès Varda, known for her distinctive bowl cut, love of cats, and heart-shaped potatoes, has long been celebrated as a patron saint of the unabashedly eccentric. A new exhibition at the Musée Carnavalet reveals a lesser-known aspect of her artistic legacy: her early photographic portraits that captured the vibrant queer culture of mid-20th century Paris during one of France's most homophobic periods.
"Agnès Varda's Paris, from here to there," running through August 24 at the Musée Carnavalet, showcases 130 photographic prints, film excerpts, and an eclectic array of Varda's personal effects. The exhibition honors the artist's playful sensibility, including a photograph of a human face discovered in a bath faucet. As Varda once said, "I like that artists disguise, mask, and deform reality," a quote featured prominently on the gallery wall.
The show reveals how Varda's creative vision was deeply influenced by her lived reality as a Brussels-born bohemian building her career in Paris, a trailblazing New Wave filmmaker, a vocal radical feminist, and surprisingly, a queer artist whose interest in gender fluidity emerged in her early photographic work. Her predilection for unconventional plots and faces hidden in household objects, whether posing with angel wings or engulfed by a giant Muppet-like coat, reflected a master of self-invention who crafted a persona as unique as those she captured on screen.
While many devotees know about Varda's marriage to acclaimed filmmaker Jacques Demy, whose bisexuality was revealed after his death from AIDS-related complications in 1990, fewer are aware of her earlier relationship with French sculptor and ceramist Valentine Schlegel. In 1951, Varda and Schlegel moved into two neglected boutiques at 86 Rue Daguerre in Montparnasse, just three miles from the stately mansions that now neighbor the Carnavalet museum.
In keeping with the street's namesake, photographer Louis Daguerre who invented the daguerreotype, Varda and Schlegel transformed one building into a photography laboratory and the other into a ceramics studio. At the home's entrance, an orange plaque designed by Schlegel featured Varda in her signature hairstyle, marking their shared creative and domestic space.
The exhibition displays several remarkable early portraits that showcase the couple's playful approach to gender expression. In one of Varda's earliest portraits from 1947, Schlegel sports a drawn-on mustache while standing before a painter's canvas, drolly mocking the self-serious nature of male modernist artists. Another photograph from a few years later captures Schlegel and her sister, ceramist Frédérique Bourguet, posing in dramatic silhouette on the steps of Montmartre.
A 1954 series features Schlegel in androgynous clothing while straddling a stool and bench, challenging traditional gender presentations. For Schlegel's 30th birthday celebration in 1955, Varda photographed a male friend posing shirtless in gilded angel wings, smiling coyly with his arms crossed over his bare chest. These images reveal a remarkably free-spirited and queer social circle during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
While the wall signage and object labels avoid didactic interpretation, fans of Varda's later masterpieces might find these early works revelatory. Her 1962 film "Cléo from 5 to 7," her 1977 abortion-rights musical "One Sings, the Other Doesn't," and her collaborations with cinematic luminaries like Jane Birkin all show traces of the gender-fluid sensibilities evident in these early photographs.
The exhibition implicitly celebrates not only how Paris influenced this 20th-century film icon, but also how queer culture and joy played a critical, though often overlooked, role in the artistic communities that brought the concept of "Gay Paree" to life. During one of French history's most homophobic periods, Varda's lens captured a world of artistic freedom and gender experimentation that would later influence her groundbreaking cinema.
Curated by Valérie Guillaume, director of the Musée Carnavalet, and Anne de Mondenard, head curator of the Photographs and Digital Images Department, the exhibition runs at the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris located at 23 Rue de Sévigné through August 24. The show offers visitors a chance to witness how Varda's early photographic work laid the foundation for her later reputation as both a cinematic pioneer and champion of unconventional artistic expression.
