Mouraux Durand-Ruel Gallery is pleased to present Written by the Sun, its inaugural exhibition, on view from September 22 to October 17, 2026, at 555 West 25th Street in Chelsea. The exhibition brings together black and white photographs by the pioneering French photographer Lucien Clergue. Spanning from the 1950s to 2010, it showcases his celebrated nude photographs with a selection of his intimate portraits of Pablo Picasso.
The exhibition takes its title from the words Picasso used to describe his friend's photographs, images he saw as written by the sun. Their friendship began in 1953, when a nineteen-year-old Clergue photographed Picasso at a bullfight in the Roman arena of Arles. It lasted twenty years and some twenty-seven encounters, from the villa La Californie in Cannes to Notre-Dame-de-Vie in Mougins, where Clergue made his final portrait of the artist in 1971. The portraits shown here record those private moments, the studio, the gaze, the everyday genius, with the intimacy of a confidant rather than a chronicler.
At the heart of the exhibition are Clergue’s iconic Nudes of the Sea. Created along the shores of the Camargue, near his native Arles in the South of France, these close-up photographs transform the female body into an elemental landscape. Emerging from the surf without faces or individual identities, the figures become timeless symbols of nature, sensuality, and the Mediterranean Sea. Published in the landmark 1968 book Née de la vague (Born of the Wave), the series brought Clergue international recognition before entering the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
If the Nudes of the Sea belong to the open horizons of the Mediterranean, Clergue's later Zebra Nudes shift into a distinctly urban setting. Photographed indoors and traversed by the light filtering through half-closed Venetian blinds, the female body becomes a surface of alternating shadow and light, echoing the rhythm of the modern city. Yet despite this change of setting, the artist's fascination remains the same: in both series, the female form transcends portraiture to become a timeless symbol of life, fertility, and sensuality.
Clergue's stature in French photography is without parallel. He was a co-founder of the Rencontres d'Arles, the world's foremost photography festival, and the first photographer ever elected to France's Académie des Beaux-Arts, and he remained a passionate advocate for the medium until his death in 2014. Written by the Sun places this historically significant figure at the threshold of a new gallery: an artist who moved fluidly between poetry and modernity.
A Curatorial Vision Across Generations
“Opening with Lucien Clergue felt inevitable. His work was born of the seascapes of the South of France, a region that is particularly close to my heart. I wanted to reintroduce his singular vision to an American audience, and especially to New York, a city that played a defining role in his career, where he photographed part of his Zebra Nudes series and became the first French living photographer to be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. I hope this exhibition will encourage a new generation of American audiences to rediscover his work.” shared Victoria Mouraux Durand-Ruel.
Gallery founder Victoria Mouraux Durand-Ruel, a Paris-born art advisor and curator, is a direct descendant of Paul Durand-Ruel, the dealer who championed the Impressionists before the world was ready and introduced them to America with his celebrated 1886 New York exhibition. Nearly a hundred and forty years later, a Durand-Ruel returns to New York with a gallery of her own, carrying the same conviction: that a great gallery's responsibility is to champion artists before the rest of the world catches up.
Working in close collaboration with the Durand-Ruel Archives in Paris and Frederick Mouraux Gallery in Brussels, the gallery places Impressionist, Modern, and Post-War works in dialogue with living contemporary artists across painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, drawing, and installation. Beyond exhibitions, it is envisioned as a place for dialogue, through lectures, publications, performances, and collaborations that bring together artists, collectors, scholars, and the public.
Written by the Sun sets the tone for the gallery's program in the seasons ahead.
