William Klein

For this new exhibition, the gallery is pleased to present the cinema of William Klein, on the occasion of a new exhibition dedicated to his film work. A major photographer of the twentieth century, William Klein holds a singular place in the history of the image. His work transcends the boundaries of the still image to invent a radical visual language, built on movement, tension, and the energy of reality. From the very beginning, Klein imposed a direct, frontal, provocative, almost physical approach. He did not merely frame the world: he staged it.

“Anyone who claims to be objective is not realistic.” For William Klein, there is no such thing as absolute truth. Only the relativity of what is seen and the radicality of the gaze matter. Born in 1926 in New York and deceased in 2022 in Paris, William Klein remained throughout his life both a creator and a sharp, irreverent observer. The expatriate American was a complete visual artist: photographer, painter, visual artist, graphic designer, and filmmaker. A practitioner of direct cinema, he directed more than twenty short, medium-length, and feature films, both fiction and documentaries, between 1958 and 2005.

Klein disrupted cinema just as he had shaken the publishing world with the release of his first book, Life is Good & Good for You in New York, in 1956. In Broadway by Light, his first venture behind the camera, he filmed the illuminated signs of Times Square and created what was probably the first pop film in the history of cinema. Avant-garde and iconoclastic, Klein remained so throughout all his films and maintained a direct connection with the spirit of the French New Wave.

The exhibition highlights this continuity through a selection of major films: Broadway by Light (1958), Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966), Mr. Freedom (1969), Muhammad Ali the Greatest (1974), as well as In and Out of Fashion (1998). In Mr. Freedom, a political and pop satire, Klein directly attacks the excesses of power and American representations, notably around figures resembling a pre-Trump archetype, in what already stands as a biting critique of spectacle culture and domination. These works reveal the same obsession: that of an image in perpetual motion, traversed by light, blur, bodies, faces, and the energy of his characters.

The exhibition design extends this logic. It brings together original posters from his films, rare photographs taken during shoots — Klein remaining above all focused on the camera — painted contact sheets, as well as a selection of images from his major works, notably New York, Rome, and Tokyo. Some of these photographs, now iconic, possess an almost cinematic intensity: they could belong to films that do not exist. In reality, they embody Klein’s own cinema.

Through this dialogue between works, the exhibition reveals what runs through the entirety of William Klein’s oeuvre: the same urgency of vision, the same energy of framing, and the same desire to make the image a shock. On the occasion of his centenary, the gallery thus proposes a reconsideration of William Klein’s work not as an alternation between photography and cinema, but as one single language: that of a genius for whom the image is always in the process of becoming. In life as in cinema.