Lucien Clergue is one of only three photographers to receive the French Legion of Honor award. (Henri Cartier-Bresson and André Kertész complete the triad.) Given this distinction, it’s quite astounding that a nascent private gallery like the Pierre Menard Gallery, at 10 Arrow St., would hold an extensive collection of his work. Yet the gallery’s exhibition of 84 of Clergue’s prints, on display through March 15, is notable for reasons other than its mere existence. The massive assembly at once reinforces and threatens Clergue’s photographs.

Though the show includes works from many periods of Clergue’s acclaimed oeuvre, its emphasis is squarely on female nudes. In these photographs, Clergue plays alchemist with seemingly endless permutations of his preferred elements—flesh, water, and light.

In his most impressive photographs, these three elements harmonize, none taking precedence over the others. In “Nu de la Mer” (1966), water rises tranquilly around the legs and torso of a bather and courses in at her waist, forming a delicate liquid skirt jeweled by streaks of glimmering refractions of the midday sun that fall upon her thighs.

In another well balanced print, “Soleil sur Marais” (1962), jittery zigzags of light serve as a topographical map, and mark a woman fully submerged just under the surface of the ocean. Because of the high contrast and abstraction of the photograph, the woman is, at first, hidden from the viewer. Discovering her amidst the jumble of bright squiggles becomes an act of undressing her.

The water-as-clothing motif appears in several of the other photographs, and is part of the larger allegory of water-as-mother. Clergue’s nudes are not merely in the water, but are absorbed in it, as if flesh and water were the same transmutable substance.

If water is mother in Clergue’s visual vocabulary, then the city is man. Clergue’s industrial skylines serve as antagonists to the female form, which has been removed from nurturing rivulets and seas. In “Primavera in New York,” a woman bathes in a rhombus of springtime light—rather than water—that shines through the window of a bare apartment. The two towers of World Trade Center suggestively pierce the horizon within the frame of the window.

“Nude in Soho” is similarly configured, though this time the sunbather is on the ledge of a balcony. From Soho, the two towers loom much larger, occupying much of the right half of the photograph, and are accompanied by a suggestively shaped silo on the left. Unlike their marine counterparts, both these women look weary; the phallic and inhospitable city thrust upon their delicate complexions.

Clergue’s recent “Nu Zébré” series provides a counterpoint to this antagonism. Each “Nu Zébré” is a variation on the simple but very expressive setup of window blinds cracked open just enough to cast thin stripes of light on a female model. The blinds filter the light in long straight lines, but upon the body each line curves, thickens, and thins in its own unique way.

In these slyly minimal photographs, Clergue most creatively celebrates the female form, for which the plain rigidity of the inorganic world is a foil. Here, it is the women who are strong, not the city.

Also receiving their fair share of attention in the main gallery are Clergue’s semi-abstractions of salt flats, marshes, and coastal areas. The arid earth in “Craquelures de Sel” resembles Aaron Siskind’s peeling posters, and the undulating reflections of reeds in “Roseaux, Le Marais d’Arles” hearken back to similar photographs by Harry Callahan. Still, these images are striking in their clarity and sophistication, and retain the mark of Clergue’s individuality.

Downstairs, among throngs of nudes, one wall of the showroom hosts several of Clergue’s epic photographs of El Cordobés, the dauntless Andalusian matador. “Danseuse aux Affiches,” from his eerie series of young itinerant circus performers entitled “Saltimbanques,” hangs on the same wall. Sadly, it is the only print from “Saltimbanques,” and its quiet innocence is engulfed by the vigor and sexuality of the surrounding photographs.

Though the show is full of photographic gems, the breadth at times feels scattered and diffuse. Shoddy prints of some of Clergue’s famous friends clog a far corner downstairs, contributing to an overall squeeze that is just too tight. Ultimately, however, the scope of the collection highlights the many variations Clergue plays on each theme as well as the creativity and technical mastery necessary to do so successfully.

—Staff writer Jeremy S. Singer-Vine can be reached at jsvine@fas.harvard.edu.