Willy Ronis: Unmissable & Unseen
Stéphane Kovalsky Collection

Auction: Wednesday, 15 December 2021, 7pm

Online Catalogue: here

Preview:
Fri, Sat 10, 11 December, 11am-6pm
Mon, Tue 13, 14 December, 11am-6pm

Contact:
Elodie Landais
+33 1 42 99 20 84
elandais@artcurial.com

The Auction will pay tribute to the photographic work of Willy Ronis, with some 200 exceptional photos coming under the hammer. There are both iconic and more intimate images tracing the career of this renowned photographer. An event not to be missed by collectors worldwide who will have an exclusive opportunity to discover both emblematic and previously unseen prints.

Following the highly successful first sale of photographs from the Stéphane Kovalsky Collection in 2016, Artcurial is delighted to present the second part of the sale "Willy Ronis: Iconic & Unseen", Collection Stéphane Kovalsky, taking place on 15 December in Paris.

The sale, comprising over 200 works of both iconic and more intimate images, looks back at the career of this important artist photographer, who was friends with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Edouard Boubat.

The photographs in the sale all come from the estate of Willy Ronis, one of the collections of Stéphane Kovalsky, the artist's grandson. He would like, with this sale, to pay a personal tribute to his grandfather, as well as recall his place in the history of photography during the second half of the 20th century.

Willy Ronis was born in Paris in 1910, in modest surroundings. His father owned a photographic studio and gave his son his first camera at the age of sixteen. Willy Ronis began by taking photos of the Eiffel Tower and he signed the family photos. He soon abandoned stereotypical subjects, preferring to record what he saw on the spot. He was present during the workers' demonstrations in the 1930s. Society was changing and he was a witness to this. His father died in 1936 and the family business went into bankruptcy. This was an opportunity for Ronis to change his life and he decided to become a freelance photographer, taking images of society as it changed, with the rise of the Popular Front and the social advances of 1936.

Newspapers began to commission reports from him. He threw himself into the working-class world with his fi rst report on the Citroën factories in Javel, for the Regards magazine in Paris in 1938. It was at this time that he became friends with colleagues David Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa.

After the interruption of the Second World War, which he spent in the south of France where he met Jacques Prévert, he returned to Paris. His camera was immediately put to use again, immortalising scenes of everyday life: the arrival of prisoners from 1945, the joy of Parisians at the Victory…

It was at the same time that he joined the Groupe des XV and the Rapho agency, founding the French humanist school. Paris and its regions became his favourite subject. He worked tirelessly to capture simple moments of the capital’s inhabitants and the raw beauty of the city. In the 1950s, he focused his attention on Belleville-Ménilmontant. He continued to report on current aff airs, particularly the communist movements, always focusing on the working classes.

Modern society transformed the environment he was used to photographing. The car invaded Paris in the 1960s. Willy Ronis preferred to take refuge in the South, while continuing to travel regularly to the capital to follow the changes taking place in the city (the construction of the RER, the appearance of the Pompidou Centre...) but his idealism didn't fl ourish in this new industrial straitjacket.

In his later years, he returned to Paris and negotiated that the state pay his rent for the rest of his life, in exchange for the donation of his entire body of work. The photographs of these last decades were marked by a return to form. In 2001 he decided, in spite of everything, to put his camera away for good, and he died 8 years later, in 2009.