Romance and realism in Brassai’s Paris pictures
By Robert Reed / Special to The Daily Yomiuri
The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo)
September 1, 2005 Thursday
The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Ebisu is celebrating
its 10th year with a schedule of special exhibitions that reflect
its character as an institution dedicated to building and educating
an audience for the art of photography. After a series of three
exhibitions covering the history of photography in Japan up through
World War II, the museum now presents a show of the works of Brassai,
one of Europe’s best-known photographers of the 20th century.
This show is exemplary of the kind of high-quality presentations of
foreign artists the museum has sought to bring its audience over the
last 10 years and, in fact, is one that was assembled by the Pompidou
Centre, Paris, in 2000, to celebrate the centenary of the artist’s
birth and that has since toured to Britain and Italy.
Brassai is known today primarily as a photographer of the streets
and cafes of Paris at the time between the two world wars when the
city was the artistic capital of Europe. Like so many of the artists,
writers and thinkers gathered in Paris at that time, Brassai was not
a native Parisian but an expatriate drawn to the City of Light by
its irresistible intellectual and artistic gravity.
Born Gyula Halasz, the pseudonym Brassai that he chose after beginning
his artistic activities in Paris in the early 1930s means “of Brasso”
(Brasov), his native town in what was Hungarian Transylvania (now
part of Romania). His mother was Armenian and his father a Hungarian
professor of French literature with a degree from the Sorbonne. After
studying art in Budapest and Berlin, Brassai finally realized his
dream of living in Paris at the age of 25, in 1924.
During his first years in Paris, Brassai supported himself by writing
as a correspondent for Hungarian and German publications while devoting
himself to the study of French. In Berlin, he had counted artists
such as Kandinsky, Kokoschka and Moholy-Nagy among his friends,
and after moving to Paris he was again quick to make friends in art
circles. One of the first of these was the photographer Eugene Atget,
whose works Brassai came to admire deeply.
It was in 1929 that a friend lent Brassai a camera so that he could
take his own pictures to send back with his articles to Hungary and
Germany rather than having to rely on other photographer’s pictures.
As soon as he began to take and develop pictures, Brassai decided that
photography was a medium through which he could express his view of
the world.
In Brassai’s first serious portraits of Paris, beginning in 1930,
what we see is not the City of Light but the empty streets of the
Parisian night that he loved to wander. The collection of photographs
published late in 1932 under the title Paris du nuit (and in the
English edition as Paris After Dark in 1934) quickly caught the
attention of the Paris art world.
In the selection of works from this period on view in the Ebisu show,
we see the deserted night streets, peopled only occasionally by young
hoodlums from the slums and prostitutes on the Place d’Italie. In
these early years Brassai also photographed the nightlife of Paris,
in the cafes and bars, the dance halls and the brothels.
If the images appear stark it is because Brassai sought unadorned
reality above all else. If they seem unfinished it is because, like
that first camera that started him on his quest, Brassai always tried
to keep the spirit of the amateur, using no special equipment and
developing no new techniques.
In keeping with this stance, he also fervently denied the label of
artist throughout his career. The ground he broke was not in the
realm of technique or style but in the new subject matter he found
and the intimate knowledge of the fellow artists he photographed in
their studios. Brassai considered Goethe to be his true mentor and
he adopted the philosopher’s aphorism as his own: “Little by little,
objects have raised me to their own level.”
There is a striking photograph in this show titled A Subway Pillar
that exemplifies a series of photographs in which Brassai sought to
express the nobility of ordinary objects. He called this series Objets
a Grandes Echelles (Large-scale Objects) and it was these images that
caught the eye of Picasso and made him ask Brassai to photograph the
large stock of sculptures he had not yet shown the public.
Later, Brassai would be invited to the studios of many artists and
writers of the day, including Matisse, Giacometti, Pierre Bonnard,
George Braque, Georges Rouault, Bernard Buffet, Aristide Maillol,
Samuel Beckett, Thomas Mann and Olivier Messiaen. Particularly
memorable was a 1939 pictorial feature in Life magazine titled
“Picasso in his Studio.”
But this is not the side of Brassai’s career that the Ebisu show
focuses on. The Pompidou Centre collection from which his show is
compiled includes the vast archive of the Brassai estate and the
artist’s personal collection that his widow, Gilberte, donated to the
museum. From this, the show seeks to present the full spectrum of
Brassai’s own creative genius rather than his perhaps more visible
role as chronicler of the Paris art world. Thus, the show includes
Brassai drawings and sculpture as well as photographs.
As an art student, Brassai had naturally studied drawing, and he would
return to drawing as a medium of artistic expression in his 40s, partly
out of necessity. In the fateful month of June 1940, when the German
Army occupied Paris, Brassai was in Cannes, having fled before the
invasion with many of his artist friends. Although he had an invitation
to move to the United States, he boarded the last refugee train back
to Paris because he had forgotten to bring along his negatives.
Back in Paris, Brassai was told by the German occupation authority
to apply for a license to practice his profession as a photographer.
When he refused to do so, he was forbidden to work as a photographer
for the remainder of the war. This is when he returned to drawing and
made it a medium that he would continue to work in for the rest of
his life. This is also the period when Picasso asked him to photograph
his sculptures.
After the war, Brassai began making sculptures of his own, from the
stones he found during his frequent alpine treks in the French Alps.
Many of these charming works are stylized nudes that parallel his work
in drawing and photography–also on display in this show. Other works
seem to reflect the primitivism that had captured the imagination of
Picasso and many other artists of the day. And one humorous sculpture
is a Picassoesque bust in miniature of Picasso himself.
Another part of this show that is sure to impress visitors is the
selection of prints from Brassai’s Graffiti series, a collection
of photos of Paris wall graffiti that the artist sought out and
photographed over a period of more than 30 years. These images created
a sensation in New York when they were first shown together at the
Museum of Modern Art in a show organized by American photographer
Edward Steichen.
The reception was equally fervent in Europe when Brassai’s Graffiti
books were published in Germany and France. By this time, artists
like Picasso, Braque, Miro and Dubuffet were already avid collectors
of these prints, some of which came in pairs with a 10-year interval
between them to show how the graffiti had aged over the years. In
this show, these haunting images are grouped under Brassai’s original
themes of Love, Death, Magic and the Primitive.
Brassai–From the Pompidou Centre Collection
Until Sept. 25, open daily 10 a.m.-6 p.m. (until 8 p.m. on Thursdays
and Fridays). Closed Mondays except Sept. 19, when the museum closes
the following day instead.
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, a seven-minute walk from
JR Ebisu Station.
Admission: 1,000 yen for adults, 900 yen for university students and
800 yen for high school and middle school students and seniors 65
and older.
Information: visit or call (03) 3280-0099.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress