“Lartigue cannot be defined as just a sports photographer, rather he's an all rounder,” says Marion Perceval, director of the Lartigue Donation. A few weeks ahead of the Paris Olympics, Polka presents the artist's work as part of a major tribute exhibition at the Polka gallery, from May 31 to July 13.

From the Belle Epoque to the 1980s, Lartigue photographed everything moving he could find: tennis matches, balloon and rowing events, beach games, ski, snow and water fun, car races, and even the concours d'élégance that took place around the grounds... Far from effort and sweat, what Jacques Henri Lartigue found and loved in sport was the beauty in gesture, the art of outdoor living. In the atmosphere of Anglomania that developed during the Belle Epoque, the ideal of sport as an art of living imposed itself on the French bourgeoisie as a quasi-aristocratic pastime, in the image of what it was for the British elite trained at the prestigious schools and universities of Eton, Cambridge or Oxford... It's hardly surprising to find Jacques Henri Lartigue at the heart of this jet-set, in Biarritz or Nice. Yet Lartigue is not, in the truest sense of the word, an athlete. He's a sportsman. Before the First World War, members of his family were among the first vacationers to visit the French and Swiss Alps, where they enjoyed Nordic skiing under the astonished gaze of the locals. His images tell the story of a time when the sport was practiced in civilian clothes. It's true that Suzanne Lenglen, captured training in Nice in May 1921, still plays in a long dress. And René Lacoste had not yet scissored the sleeves off his dress shirt to free his gesture. A contemporary of the advent of the automobile and the airplane, Jacques Henri Lartigue was also fascinated by machines, making the 20th century one of discovery and progress. The photographer's eye was not spared either by the people of chic lookers, wearing boater hats or top hats, who sprang up along roadsides and racetracks... Yet Lartigue had no particular interest in sports, as evidenced by his many shots of rowing, swimming, water-skiing, walking, running, ballooning, skiing, ice-skating... With no benefit other than personal fulfillment, the photographer and his entourage of “fashionable” young people consented freely to physical prowess. However, there are very few images showing bodies in full exertion or pain. No sweat, no suffering. For this society, activity must be a continuum of pleasure. For the beauty of the gesture.