Brassaï

by Brassaï, Roger Grenier (Introducción)

Brassai was the first great chronicler of the urban underbelly This sumptuous Brassai overview gathers outstanding prints of his finest and most popular photographs, drawing on the Estate Brassai in Paris and the collections of leading museums in France and the United States. The work is organized into 18 thematic groupings, such as “Paris by Night,” “Portraits” and “Self-Portraits,” “Body of a Woman,” “Graffiti,” “Places and Things,” “Pleasures” and “The Street,” focusing throughout on his celebrated depictions of 1930s Paris. When Brassai took up photography in the late 1920s, after his move to Paris in 1924 (from his native Brassov in Austria-Hungary, via Budapest and Berlin), the photobook was blossoming as a new art form ripe for exploration. Brassai gave the genre one of its undisputed classics, Paris de nuit (1933)―the first in what is now a long line of photobooks portraying cities by night. The book was popular with both cognoscenti and tourists, and made Brassai famous; he became the first great chronicler of the urban underbelly, with images of prostitutes, gangsters, brothels and night clubs. Today Brassai is canonical, and easily one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century, as this 368-page volume―the most beautifully produced and edited survey of his accomplishment in print―amply attests. Born Gyula Halász, Brassai (1899–1984) began his career as a sculptor, painter and journalist, forming friendships with artists and writers such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Jacques Prévert, Henri Michaux and Henry Miller, most of whom he later photographed. Brassaï published numerous great photobooks throughout his career, including Voluptés de Paris (1935), Henry Miller: The Paris Years (1975) and Artists of My Life (1982). The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, the Art Institute in Chicago and The Museum of Modern Art in New York have all held retrospectives of his work.

Genres: Photography, Nonfiction, Art

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

George Brassaï (pseudonym of Gyula Halász) (9 September 1899 — 8 July 1984) was a Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker who rose to international fame in France in the 20th century. He was one of the numerous Hungarian artists who flourished in Paris beginning between the World Wars. In the early 21st century, the discovery of more than 200 letters and hundreds of drawings and other items from the period 1940–1984 has provided scholars with material for understanding his later life and career.

Reviews

[William West]

Brassai was the photographer that Walker Evans initially wanted to be. Evans first became enamored of the concept of photography during a year spent in Paris. He dreamed of being a photo-taking equivalent of Charles Baudelaire, documenting urban modernity. But he was American, and ultimately of an American sensibility, and so he returned to his homeland and instead of becoming a photographer version of Baudelaire he became, well, Walker Evans.

Brassai truly was Baudelaire with a lens, flash and tripod. Born in Hungary, Brassai was a foreigner to Paris, like Evans, but he remained in France throughout most of his adult life and eventually attained French citizenship. His understanding of the urban night was simultaneously romantic and sinister. Indeed, in one image a man lies a top a woman in such a way that the viewer is not be able to identify the depicted behavior as love-making, sexual assault, or murder.

Brassai clearly established intimate relationships with prostitutes, pimps, and violent thugs for they devoted time and energy to posing for him. While Brassai was a photographer of the street, he was not a "street photographer" as the term would come to denote. There was nothing improvisational about his technique. He took hours to compose frames and position subjects. At one point he, not exactly humbly, compared himself to Rembrandt in his ability to bring out the inner nature of his subjects through depicting their physical form. While it sounds a boast, I didn't find his work unworthy of the comparison.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I strongly suspect that a number of different books, probably all with the simple title Brassaï, have been grouped together in this one Goodreads entry. The different editions listed here have vastly different page counts: 62, 80, 144, and 319. The Goodreads commentary on the book does not seem to refer to the same book that I have.

My copy is a 1988 paperback, published by Pantheon Books as part of the Pantheon Photo Library. The book is rather small, only 5"×7.5". It is 144 pages long. It has 63 photographs, all black and white, in the book and one other on the cover. The introduction is by Roger Grenier, translated into English by Marianne Tinnel Faure. At the back of the book there is a biographical listing of events in the life of Brassaï, a bibliography of books containing his work, and a listing of exhibitions of his work. Most of the photographs are printed on a single page, with an identitying title on the facing page; five of the photographs are printed across two facing pages. The single-page photographs are a maximum of 4"×6".

The last twelve photographs in the book are of artists and authors, or of the places in which they worked. There are pictures of the studios of Pierre Bonnard and Pablo Picasso and portrait photographs of Alberto Giacometti, Picasso, Salvador Dali and his wife Gala (one of the double-page photographs), Henri Matisse and a model, Aristide Maillol, Thomas Mann and his wife, Paul Claudel and his wife, Henri Michaux, Henry Miller, and Brassaï himself. Earlier in the book there is a portrait of Jean-Paul Sartre; I don't know why he is not included with the others.

The other fifty-one photographs include many subjects: cityscapes, including some in fog; children; prostitutes, some with customers; dancers; dogs; couples; a moth; and others. Three of the pictures are each labeled "Graffiti" with brief descriptions of what is represented; I believe that "graffiti" is plural and each one of these should be titled "Graffito."

My favorite photograph in the book is titled "Madrid, 1950." It shows two older men talking on a street next to a building; they are both wearing hats and dark, apparently heavy coats. Others that I especially like include: a young child, delighted by a balloon, standing near a balloon seller, effective even in black and white (labeled "Parc Montsouris, Paris, 1936."); a lovely set of outdoor stairs ("Montmartre, Paris, 1936."); a man at an outdoor book stall ("Louis Dimier, member of the Institute, on the quays, Paris, 1932-1933."); a person in a gorilla costume, wearing a very loud plaid suit and a bow tie and holding a young child ("'King Kong,' Montmartre, Paris, about 1933."); a long wall on a foggy night ("The wall at La Sante prison, Paris, 1932."); a man wheeling a bicycle in front of a billboard with a gigantic picture of Marlene Dietrich ("'Marlene,' Paris, about 1937."); a young girl and boy ("André et Paulette, 1949"); nuns in a cactus garden ("The Exotic Gardens, Monaco, about 1945"); and two pictures I had mentioned previously, Bonnard's studio ("Bonnard's studio, Le Cannet, October 1946.") and a portrait of Henry Miller ("Henry Miller, Paris, 1931.").

I very much like Roger Grenier's informative introduction.

This is a good book, which would be greatly improved if the reproduced photographs were larger.

[Lu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gostei muito de conhecer Brassaï.

[Margot Note]

"Brassaï, the Parisian from Transylvania, seems in contrast [to Henri Cartier-Bresson] an angel of darkness. His sensibility dates from an earlier age, and delights in the primal, the fantastic, the ambiguous, even the bizarre" (7). So true, Mr. Szarkowski!