Yvonne Chevalier

Yvonne Chevalier (18 January 1899 – 22 June 1982) was a French magazine photographer who was active from 1929 to 1970. She made her first photographs at the age of ten while on holiday at Saint-Valery-en-Caux.

Career Gaulard married a doctor in 1920 and their daughter was born the next year. In 1925 Chevalier encountered the work of David Octavius Hill which she admired, and in 1929 she abandoned fine art for photography. She set up a studio in the Impasse Nansouty in the 14th arrondissement, Paris in 1930. that year which was illustrated predominantly with her photographs in the 'New Vision' modernist style for which she and Denise Bellon, Florence Henri, Nora Dumas and Ergy Landau are known. Tugal wrote that;"Ms. Yvonne Chevalier, who is becoming a photographer of the highest order, pursues her research quite independently of her husband. It is not so much the human figure that attracts her as the picturesque aspects of life, be it rocks, machinery or a market corner. The science of lighting is innate to her and she takes objects from such an angle that it seems that she extracts the life of things to infuse them with a new one according to her wishes."

The Chevalier couple made friends of personalities in literature, the visual arts and music, whom she photographed, recording portraits of Arthur Honegger, André Gide (and in 1951, his death mask), Colette, Mariette Lydis, Camille Claudel, François Mauriac, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Max Jacob, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the bookseller Adrienne Monnier and her friends, and intimate studies of writer and Resistance fighter Jean Prévost. She was herself photographed in 1932 by the German Marianne Breslauer.

In 1931 she produced stills for the film Baleydier starring Michel Simon and in 1935 documented the sculpture of Auguste Rodin in a series of close-ups. She contributed illustrations for the magazines Arts et Métiers Graphiques, Photo Graphie, Le Cinegraph, Musica and Photo Illustration, and from this time on she was personal photographer of the expressionist painter Georges Rouault.

In 1936 Chevalier was a founder, with Emmanuel Sougez, of the association Le Rectangle, the only woman amongst its thirteen members, and participated in all of its exhibitions including those at La Galerie de la Pléiade, Galerie René van den Berg and François Tuefferd's gallery, Le Chasseur d'Images, and held two solo shows in 1935 and 1937, both at the gallery of the Librairie Van den Berg. In the following year she photographed the artists at the Pavilion de la Danse, and produced reportage on Algeria and Le Midi. In 1938 she documented performers at the Ambassadeurs theatre, Paris.

Just before the outbreak of World War II, in 1939 Chevalier recorded the architecture of the Abbaye du Thoronet. However, the majority of her work was destroyed during the war. Photo historian Christian Bouqueret (1950-2013) later rediscovered and promoted her work. president of the jury J. M. Auradon remarked on her work;"...the portrait by Yvonne Chevalier on the previous panel, reveals in Tuefferd a delicate sensibility, which vibrates in its atmosphere of light grays, comparable to pencil drawings in manner and genre. We loved her fantasies, the fountain, and the one who sticks out his tongue; the foliage is very beautiful. We lingered over the beautiful portrait of Mme X..., by Yvonne Chevalier, beautifully executed, beautiful realisation of values, sincere; the same praise for nos. 336 and 340 by this same artist; these very different proofs proceed from the same spirit and deserve praise; Yvonne Chevalier does not reveal her process, but it is a style that she knows how to create for herself." while journalist Germain Paterne considered it "a remarkable idea, but…. perhaps not dramatically enough realised." She also illustrated novels Le Lys dans la Vallee by Honoré de Balzac, Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes and Marc Chadourne's Cecile de la Folie.

In 1970 she stopped all photographic activity and after editing her archive during 1980, she died on 22 June 1982 in Paris.

Exhibitions

1932 Art Phototypique, Palais du Tennis, Paris 1937 Jeunes Filles el Paysages, Librairie René Van den Berg, Paris (solo) 1947 The Nude, Groupe des XV, Galerie Pascaud, Paris National Gallery of Art, Washington