Marie Robert

Marie Robert is chief curator at the Musée d’Orsay, photography and cinema. She has curated exhibitions with a social science focus, including “Who’s Afraid of Women Photographers”, “Splendours and Miseries. Images of prostitution”, “Jazz Power” and “Cinema at last”. She has taught at the École du Louvre (photography and gender) and, with Luce Lebart, edited Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes (Textuel, 2020). Her research focuses on the articulation of photography and politics.

Project at  Villa Medici

In 1888, Gabrielle Hébert and the painter Alexis Axilette took dazzling shots of female nudes in the garden of Villa Medici. Revealing a singular intimacy between the resident and the director’s wife, they mark the beginning of a body of photographic work that is still little known today: moments of camaraderie between artists, portraits, scenes in the surrounding villages, tableaux vivants in the Bosco, and Ernest Hébert at work. Would Gabrielle Hébert’s photographic corpus be the only existing “diary in images”, when testimonies written by residents, directors or visitors abound for two centuries? My research residency at Villa Medici will be an opportunity to collect the material traces of the photographic production, often confidential and devoid of artistic ambition, of those who lived, for a year or a lifetime, in this enclave. What counterpoint can the “poor images” (snapshots, live scenes, family photos) provide to the academic history of the Academy? The collection of images gathered in this way could be the subject of an exhibition and a publication.

© Musée d’Orsay / Sophie Crépy