His work changed the course of photographic history. In 1954, William Klein (born 1928), until then a painter, walked the streets of New York with a camera. He revolutionized the approach to portraiture. Abolishing the distance then required between the photographer and the individual crossed in the street, he takes us into the grain of the film and that of the skin: a plunge into both the photographic and human matter. The exhibition, presented in the exceptional setting of the Abbey of Saint-Ouen, revisits this great name in photography, proposing to survey the major axes of a dense body of work, entirely immersed in an urban and cosmopolitan twentieth century. The essential series produced in New York, Moscow, Tokyo, Rome and Paris are presented for the first time in Normandy, after the retrospectives held at the Tate Modern in London (2012) and FOAM, Amsterdam (2014). His filmic and painted work are also evoked, as well as his fashion photography, for a complete portrait of the multiple figures of the Klein artist.

The exhibition William Klein, Figure(s) of the Century has been labeled and supported by the Normandie Impressionniste Festival. It has also received the support of the Fondation Flaubert – Université de Rouen Normandie, the MATMUT and the laboratories Picto and Janvier.