Deauville in the eyes of Gisèle Freund
The collections of the future Musée des Franciscaines have just been enriched by a series of six photographs taken by Gisèle Freund in the 1950s on the quays and behind the store windows of Deauville. In 2011, the City of Deauville had already acquired a color photograph of two lovers seated in front of the sea (1955) and a portrait of the Maharadja of Jodhpur and Madame attending a polo match in Deauville.
Born in Berlin, Gisèle Freund (1908-2000) is one of the major European photographers of the 20th century. Fleeing Nazism, she settled in Paris in the 1930s. In 1933, she took the famous black and white portrait of André Malraux, with a wisp of hair and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Adopted by writers and publishers, before and after the war she was responsible for the first color portraits of young writers who would become the great authors of the twentieth century: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, André Gide, ... Famous portraitist, she was exhibited, from 1981 to 1995, in all the town halls of France after having realized, at his request, the official portrait of François Mitterrand. The first woman to join the Magnum agency from 1947 to 1954, Gisèle Freund was also involved in reportage and photojournalism. In the mid-1950s she discovered Deauville and Trouville. She observed and captured with equal attention the popular dimension and the great events.
