Denise Colomb dies at 101

Denise Colomb is a photographer whose life spanned the centuries. Particularly memorable are her pictures of Antonin Artaud, last century's greatest innovator of the theater and it's most powerful mind.

Perhaps it was his hyper intelligence that sent him to the nuthouse. Perhaps it was the nuthouse that finished him off. Denise Colomb took theses pictures when Artaud was released for a while - and it proved her most difficult assignment. Yet she always kept the vision of a humanist - under the most difficult circumstances.

She died on January 1, at a healthy 101 years of age, at her home in Paris.

Her brother Pierre Loeb, owner of a famous gallery in Paris, who exposed many surrealist artists in the 1920s, organized the now famous photo session with Antonin Artaud in 1947.

She took pictures of Nicolas de Staà«l before his suicide in Antibes, and photographed many famous artists, painters, sculptors, amongst them Georges Braque (1949), Pablo Picasso (1952), Alberto Giacometti (1954), Pierre Soulages (1955), Le Corbusier (1961)...

In 1926 Denise Loeb married Gilbert Cahen, a world travelling engineer, visiting with him Asia and Polyneasia. In Saigon she took her first photographs with a small camera, starting a diary of pictures which was later remarked and started her on various other assignments.

During the war she hides in the south of France, surviving with her family and children the persecution of the Nazis.

En 1991 she donated her work of over 50 000 negatives to the state and was honored through a retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo.

Without any doubt she's a pioneer of photography and she will be remembered as one of the finest French photographers of the XX century.