Henri Cartier-bresson Images à La Sauvette

[Lenora Rademacher]

HenriCartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, France.[3] His father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, whose Cartier-Bresson thread was a staple of French sewing kits. His mother's family were cotton merchants and landowners from Normandy, where Henri spent part of his childhood. His mother was descended from Charlotte Corday.[5][3]

The Cartier-Bresson family lived in a bourgeois neighborhood in Paris, Rue de Lisbonne, near Place de l'Europe and Parc Monceau. Since his parents were providing financial support, Henri pursued photography more freely than his contemporaries. Henri also sketched.[1]

Young Henri took holiday snapshots with a Box Brownie; he later experimented with a 34 inch view camera. He was raised in traditional French bourgeois fashion, and was required to address his parents with formal vous rather than tu. His father assumed that his son would take up the family business, but Henri was strong-willed and also feared this prospect.

Cartier-Bresson attended cole Fnelon, a Catholic school that prepared students for the Lyce Condorcet. A governess called "Miss Kitty" who came from across the Channel, instilled in him the love of - and competence in - the English language.[6] The proctor caught him reading a book by Rimbaud or Mallarm, and reprimanded him, "Let's have no disorder in your studies!". Cartier-Bresson said, "He used the informal 'tu', which usually meant you were about to get a good thrashing. But he went on, 'You're going to read in my office.' Well, that wasn't an offer he had to repeat."[7]

He studied painting when he was just 5 years old, taking an apprenticeship in his uncle Louis' studio. After trying to learn music, Cartier-Bresson was introduced to oil painting by his uncle Louis, a gifted painter and winner of the Prix de Rome in 1910. But his painting lessons were cut short when uncle Louis was killed in World War I.[8]

In 1927, Cartier-Bresson entered a private art school and the Lhote Academy, the Parisian studio of the Cubist painter and sculptor Andr Lhote. Lhote's ambition was to integrate the Cubists' approach to reality with classical artistic forms; he wanted to link the French classical tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David to Modernism. Cartier-Bresson also studied painting with society portraitist Jacques mile Blanche.

During that period, he read Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Mallarm, Freud, Proust, Joyce, Hegel, Engels and Marx. Lhote took his pupils to the Louvre to study classical artists and to Paris galleries to study contemporary art. Cartier-Bresson's interest in modern art was combined with an admiration for the works of the Renaissance masters: Jan van Eyck, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca. Cartier-Bresson regarded Lhote as his teacher of "photography without a camera."

Although Cartier-Bresson became frustrated with Lhote's "rule-laden" approach to art, the rigorous theoretical training later helped him identify and resolve problems of artistic form and composition in photography. In the 1920s, schools of photographic realism were popping up throughout Europe but each had a different view on the direction photography should take. The Surrealist movement, founded in 1924, was a catalyst for this paradigm shift[vague]. Cartier-Bresson began socializing with the Surrealists at the Caf Cyrano, in the Place Blanche. He met a number of the movement's leading protagonists, and was drawn to the Surrealist movement's technique of using the subconscious and the immediate to influence their work. The historian Peter Galassi explains:

The Surrealists approached photography in the same way that Aragon and Breton...approached the street: with a voracious appetite for the usual and unusual...The Surrealists recognized in plain photographic fact an essential quality that had been excluded from prior theories of photographic realism. They saw that ordinary photographs, especially when uprooted from their practical functions, contain a wealth of unintended, unpredictable meanings.[9]

Cartier-Bresson matured artistically in this stormy cultural and political atmosphere. But, although he knew the concepts, he couldn't express them; dissatisfied with his experiments, he destroyed most of his early paintings.

From 1928 to 1929, Cartier-Bresson studied art, literature, and English at the University of Cambridge, where he became bilingual.[10] In 1930, he was conscripted into the French Army and stationed at Le Bourget near Paris, a time about which he later remarked: "And I had quite a hard time of it, too, because I was toting Joyce under my arm and a Lebel rifle on my shoulder."[7]

Two years after Harry Crosby died by suicide, Cartier-Bresson's affair with Caresse Crosby ended in 1931, leaving him broken-hearted. During conscription he read Conrad's Heart of Darkness. This gave him the idea of escaping and finding adventure on the Cte d'Ivoire in French colonial Africa.[14] He survived by shooting game and selling it to local villagers. From hunting, he learned methods which he later used in photography. On the Cte d'Ivoire, he contracted blackwater fever, which nearly killed him. While still feverish, he sent instructions to his grandfather for his own funeral, asking to be buried in Normandy, at the edge of the Eawy Forest while Debussy's String Quartet was played. Although Cartier-Bresson took a portable camera (smaller than a Brownie Box) to Cte d'Ivoire, only seven photographs survived the tropics.[15]

Returning to France, Cartier-Bresson recuperated in Marseille in late 1931 and deepened his relationship with the Surrealists. He became inspired by a 1930 photograph by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi showing three naked young African boys, caught in near-silhouette, running into the surf of Lake Tanganyika. Titled Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika, this captured the freedom, grace and spontaneity of their movement and their joy at being alive. That photograph inspired him to stop painting and to take up photography seriously. He explained, "I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant."[16]

In 1934, Cartier-Bresson met a young Polish intellectual, a photographer named David Szymin who was called "Chim" because his name was difficult to pronounce. Szymin later changed his name to David Seymour. The two had much in common culturally. Through Chim, Cartier-Bresson met a Hungarian photographer named Endr Friedmann, who later changed his name to Robert Capa.[17]

Cartier-Bresson traveled to the United States in 1935 with an invitation to exhibit his work at New York's Julien Levy Gallery. He shared display space with fellow photographers Walker Evans and Manuel lvarez Bravo. Carmel Snow of Harper's Bazaar gave him a fashion assignment, but he fared poorly since he had no idea how to direct or interact with the models. Nevertheless, Snow was the first American editor to publish Cartier-Bresson's photographs in a magazine. While in New York, he met photographer Paul Strand, who did camerawork for the Depression-era documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains.

When he returned to France, Cartier-Bresson applied for a job with renowned French film director Jean Renoir. He acted in Renoir's 1936 film Partie de campagne and in the 1939 La Rgle du jeu, for which he served as second assistant and played a butler. Renoir made Cartier-Bresson act so he could understand how it felt to be on the other side of the camera. Cartier-Bresson also helped Renoir make a film for the Communist party on the 200 families, including his own, who ran France. During the Spanish Civil War, Cartier-Bresson co-directed an anti-fascist film with Herbert Kline, to promote the Republican medical services.

Cartier-Bresson's first photojournalist photos to be published came in 1937 when he covered the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth,[18] for the French weekly Regards. He focused on the new monarch's adoring subjects lining the London streets, and took no pictures of the king. His photo credit read "Cartier", as he was hesitant to use his full family name.Between 1937 and 1939, Cartier-Bresson worked as a photographer for the French Communists' evening paper, Ce soir. With Chim and Capa, Cartier-Bresson was a leftist, but he did not join the French Communist party.

In 1937, Cartier-Bresson married a Javanese dancer, Ratna Mohini.[14] They lived in a fourth-floor servants' flat in Paris at 19, rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs (now rue Danielle Casanova), a large studio with a small bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom where Cartier-Bresson developed film.

When World War II broke out in September 1939, Cartier-Bresson joined the French Army as a Corporal in the film and photo unit of the French Third Army.[19] During the Battle of France, in June 1940 at St. Di in the Vosges Mountains, he was captured by German soldiers and spent 35 months in prisoner-of-war camps doing forced labor under the Nazis[citation needed]. He twice tried and failed to escape from the prison camp, and was punished by solitary confinement[citation needed]. His third escape was successful and he hid on a farm in Touraine before getting false papers that allowed him to travel in France[citation needed]. In France, he worked for the underground, aiding other escapees and working secretly with other photographers to cover the occupation and then the liberation of France[citation needed]. In 1943, he dug up his beloved Leica camera, which he had buried in Vosges farmland [citation needed].

At the end of the war he was asked by the American Office of War Information to make a documentary, Le Retour (The Return) about returning French prisoners and displaced persons[citation needed]. His film spurred a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) , that would later tour the country. The show debuted in 1947 accompanied by the publication of his first book, The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Lincoln Kirstein and Beaumont Newhall wrote the book's texts.[20]

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