PHOTO:Brassaï

One of the most renowned photographers of the interwar period, Brassaï’s reputation rests on contributions to both commercial and Avant-Garde photography. His long-time friend, the author Henry Miller, nicknamed him “The Eye of Paris” for his devotion to the city, and he was close to many of its artists. His enduring relationship with Picasso in particular yielded many famous portraits of the artist, as well as important books.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Fundación MAPFRE Archive

The exhibition “Brassaï” at Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona traces Brassaï’s career using over two hundred examples of his work. The exhibition tries to concentrate on Brassaï’s achievements as an artist, through a collection in which excellent vintage copies of his best pictures are displayed. Eleven themed groupings (plus a selection of original copies of the avant-garde magazine Minotaure) trace Brassaï’s career and at the same time highlight his renowned work in Paris during the decade of the 1930’s. Brassaï (Gyula Halás) is known primarily for his dramatic photographs of Paris at night. His pseudonym, Brassaï, is derived from his native city. He first explored the traditional visual arts and literature as he moved from his native Brasoc in the Transylvania region, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Budapest and Berlin, eventually settling in Paris in 1924. There he earned a living from sporadic journalistic work which generally involved providing photos, at first other people’s, but soon afterwards his own. Brassaï was immediately enthralled by the city, the artists and writers of Montparnasse, but also the crooks, prostitutes, pimps and other characters that made up the Parisian underworld all contributed to his being immediately captivated by the fabric of the French capital. Its everyday life, its appearance and its vitality… soon made it the focus of the intense activity he maintained throughout the thirties. Brassaï began as a serious photographer in 1929 and was intensely active throughout the 1930s. His main subject was the city of Paris: its physical material, its everyday life and especially the way it looked and its vitality by night. Artistic photography was considered marginal, but it was growing enormously as a means of illustration, both in the new illustrated magazines as well as books and other publications. It was against this background that Brassaï’s book, “Paris de Nuit” appeared in 1932, earning him immediate popular recognition. It was a topic that appealed as much to the cultural elite as to the tourist industry, which was aware of and receptive to these types of image. This duplicity also was indicative of the special interest Brassaï displayed in the nocturnal worlds of popular entertainment, crime and prostitution. When, following the Second World War, Brassaï reorganized his work into themed groups, he collected all of his scenes of Parisian nightlife together under the title “Plaisirs”. The world they so vividly expressed was both a reality and a sophisticated myth. The characters featured are generally just going about their business and yet, even so, Brassaï’s work is not documentary in nature: his goal and lasting achievement was to revitalize a rich mythology that already existed in literature and the traditional visual arts, translating it to the new medium of photography in its most visceral and immediate form. During the German occupation of Paris he gave up photography and went back to drawing and writing. Just like the majority of the drawings preserved from his time in Berlin from 1921-1922 as an art student, most of his output during and just after the German occupation of 1943-1945 are female nudes. The same thing happened with many of the sculptures he began work on after the war. When the war was over he returned to photography, although his love affair with Paris by night had ended. However, he still kept to the style that he had forged in the 1930s: direct, frank and committed to the bare facts. The overlap between the work of Brassaï as an artist and the photographs he was commissioned to take or those he intended to have published gives rise to a wide and complex range of work.

Info: Curator: Peter Galassi, Fundación MAPFRE, Casa Garriga i Nogués, Calle Diputació 250, Barcelona, Duration: 20/2-13/5/18, Days & Hours: Mon 14:00-20:00, Tue-Sat 10:00-20:00, Sun 11:00-19:00, www.fundacionmapfre.org