It was the most beautiful wedding gift. In August 2021, photographer Juergen Teller and his partner, Dovile Drizyte, just got married in Naples. Most of the guests have already returned to the plane, but the couple is lounging with a few intimates. A message appears on the bride’s smartphone. Neither dishes nor linens, Chris Dercon, then president of the Réunion des musées nationaux (RMN)-Grand Palais, had a proposal. Would Juergen Teller agree to organize a major exhibition of his work and take over 10,000 square meters at the ephemeral Grand Palais, a vast space on the Champ-de-Mars, in Paris? “The whole rest of the honeymoon, while driving or sunbathing by the pool, I kept thinking, ‘Oh my God! The Grand Palace!” “, says Juergen Teller, his eyes widening. “You would have seen it: he was happier to have been invited than to have married me,” jokes Dovile Drizyte.
Chris Dercon, who met the photographer in 1998 and exhibited him in the institutions he successively directed, from the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam to the Haus der Kunst in Munich, knew his color photographs by heart with banal realism which always seem spontaneous, with not always flattering flash and biting irony. A style identifiable at a glance, which Juergen Teller has deployed for over thirty years in uninterrupted profusion. Hundreds of portraits of stars and tender images of his family, a mess of fashion series in magazines (including M The magazine of the World) and dozens of exhibitions in museums or galleries, a slew of advertising campaigns for luxury houses and around fifty books, largely published by Steidl, the ultimate German publishing house…
“Institutions and fashion brands: Juergen works for both camps. He is everywhere “, remarks Chris Dercon, who left the RMN-Grand Palais to take the reins of the Fondation-Cartier in May. If Richard Avedon was honored at the Jeu de Paume in 2008 and Helmut Newton at the Grand Palais in 2012, both were already dead at the time of the honors. Juergen Teller, not yet 60 years old, achieved the feat of being celebrated by a French public museum during his lifetime. “His bulimia, the status of artist he acquired, his ability to always take risks: everything now points to Juergen as the contemporary Helmut Newton,” notes Ezra Petronio, artistic director and founder of the magazine Self Service, who has worked with him for twenty-five years.
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