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European photographic research tour exhibition: ‘L’equilibriste, André Kertész’ at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours Part 2

Exhibition dates: 26th June – 27th October 2019
Visited September 2019 posted September 2020

Curators: Matthieu Rivallin and Pia Viewing

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Nageur sous l’eau, Esztergom
Underwater swimmer, Esztergom
1918
Contact original

“”… especially haptic qualities are demanded of the deconstructionist performer, spectator, and reader; not to follow optically the ‘line of ideas’ in the text or in a picture and see only the representation proper, the surface, but to probe with the eyes the pictorial texture and even to enter the texture.”69 Such “touching” with the eye did not lead to a secure tactile experience of being firmly planted on the ground, for all grounds, all foundations, were suspect, however construed. We are, as Nietzsche knew, swimming in an endless sea, rather than standing on dry land. To “touch” a trace, groping blindly in the dark, is no more the guarantee of certainty than to see its residues.”

Gandelman, Claude. ‘Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts’. Bloomington, Indiana, 1991, p. 140 quoted in Martin Jay. ‘Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought’. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 512.

Touching with the eye

Part 2 of a large posting on the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours, which I saw in Tours in September 2019.

This posting contains photographs from his famous series “Distortions” (fascinating to see the original plates for the book of the same name, complete with cropping marks and red lead pencil annotations); American works from 1936 onwards, when Kertész moved to the United States to avoid the persecution of the Jews and the threat of World War II; and the late work colour Polaroids.

I admit that Kertész is not my favourite photographer. While I admire some of his photographs, I feel emotionally distant from most of them. Edward Clay observes in the quotation below that Kertész was “one of the most lyrical and formally inventive photographers of the twentieth-century… [His photographs] often convey a quiet mood of melancholy … He remains revered for his clarity of style and ability to blend simplicity with emotion, prizing impact over technical precision, seeking metaphors and geometry in everyday objects and scenarios, to turn the mundane into the surreal.”

Personally, I don’t find his photographs emotional nor lyrical, only a few poetic. Not melancholic, but geometric. In later works, he simplifies, simplifies, simplifies much like his friend Mondrian did. For me, the balance between sacred / geometry, the sacred geometry of the mystery of things, is often unbalanced in these images (particularly relevant, given the title of this exhibition). Is it enough just to turn the mundane into the surreal? Where does that lead the viewer? Is it enough to just observe, represent, without digging deeper.

At his best, in images such as Underwater swimmer, Esztergom (1918, above), Arm and Fan, New York (1937, below) and Washington Square, New York (1954, below) there is a structured, avant-garde mystery about the reality of the world, as re/presented through the object of the photograph, it’s physical presence. In Underwater swimmer, the body is stretched and distorted by an element, water, not a man-made mirror. His photographs from Hungary, Italy and early Paris possess a sensitivity of spirit that seems to have been excised from his life, the older he got. Far too often in later images, there is a “brittleness” to his photography, in which the object of reflection sits at the surface of the image, all sparkling in unflinching light. The single cloud oh so lonely in the sterile city; the man looking at the broken bench; the “buy, buy, buy” of consumer culture. You consumer Kertész’s later images, you do not reflect on them.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

All iPhone installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. View Part 1 of the posting.

“André Kertész, one of the most lyrical and formally inventive photographers of the twentieth-century, whose work advocated for spontaneity over technical precision, has left a distinctive legacy of poetic images which form a bridge between the avant-garde and geometrical precision. A roamer for much of his life, his feelings of rootlessness manifest in his work and often convey a quiet mood of melancholy. …

Claiming “I am an amateur and I intend to stay that way for the rest of my life”, Kertesz was a great source of inspiration to photographic legends such as Cartier-Bresson.

He remains revered for his clarity of style and ability to blend simplicity with emotion, prizing impact over technical precision, seeking metaphors and geometry in everyday objects and scenarios, to turn the mundane into the surreal. Nothing was too plain or ordinary for his eye, since he had a special ability to breathe life into even the most ‘unremarkable’ subjects.”

Edward Clay. “André Kertész: between poetry and geometry,” on ‘The Independent Photographer’ website, May 19th 2020 [Online] Cited 26/08/2020

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #34
1933
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #40
1933
Gelatin silver print

Installation views of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing photographs from the series Distortions, the bottom image showing at left, the photograph Underwater swimmer, Esztergom 1918
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Planches originales de la maquette du livre ‘Distortions’ (installation view)
Original plates of the model of the book ‘Distortions’
1975-1976
Collection Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing photographs from the series Distortions
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #60 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #86 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #109 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #6 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #159 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #128 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #70 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion #80 (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion (installation view)
1933
Contact original
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Portrait déformé (Visage de femme), Paris (installation view)
Distorted Portrait (Face of a Woman), Paris
1927
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

One of the twentieth century’s great photographers, André Kertész (Budapest, 1894 – New York, 1985) left a prolific body of work spanning more than seventy years (1912-1984), a blend of the poetic and the intimate with its wellspring in his Hungarian culture. The Art of Poise: André Kertész traces this singular career, showcasing compositions that bear the stamp of Europe’s avant-garde art movements, from the artist’s earliest Hungarian photographs to the blossoming of his talent in France, and from his New York years to ultimate international recognition.

Kertész arrived in Paris in October 1925. Moving in avant-garde literary and artistic circles, he photographed his Hungarian friends, artists’ studios, street life and the city’s parks and gardens. In 1933 he embarked on his famous Distortions series of nudes deformed by funhouse mirrors, producing anamorphic images similar in spirit to the work of Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp and Henry Moore.

In addition to this profusion of activity, he explored the possibility of disseminating his work in publications. Between 1933 and the end of his life he had designed and published a total of nineteen books.

In 1936 Kertész and his wife Elizabeth left for New York, where he began with a brief assignment for Keystone, the world’s biggest photographic agency. He struggled, though, to carve out a place for himself in a context whose demands were very different from those of his Paris years.

Inspired by the rediscovery of his Hungarian and French negatives, from 1963 onwards he devoted himself solely to personal projects, and was offered retrospectives by the French National Library in Paris and MoMA in New York. This fresh recognition sparked a flurry of books in which he harked back to the high points of his oeuvre. In his last years, armed with a Polaroid, he returned to his earlier practice of everyday photography.

Text from the Jeu de Paume website for the earlier exhibition The Art of Poise: André Kertész

Text from the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
La Tulipe mélancolique, New York
Melancholic Tulip, New York
1939
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Paris (installation view)
1984
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Paris
1984
Gelatin silver print

Installation views of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at top left, Ballet, New York 1938; and at bottom left, Lake Placid 1954
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Ballet, New York (installation view)
1938
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Ballet, New York
1938
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Lake Placid (installation view)
1954
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1937
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1939
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York
1939
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1954
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Escalier, rampe, ombres et femme, New York (installation view)
Staircase, banister, shadows and woman, New York
1951
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
“Buy”, Long Island
1963
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
6th Avenue, New York
1973
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Nuage égaré
Lost cloud
1937
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Nuage égaré
Lost cloud
1937
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Poughkeepsie, New York (installation view)
1937
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Poughkeepsie, New York
1937
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Of New York… (installation view)
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1951
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Of New York… (installation view)
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
“Buy”, New York (installation view)
1966
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Of New York… (installation view)
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Double page de la maquette originale du livre ‘Of New York…’ (installation view)
Double page of the original model of the book ‘Of New York…’
1975-76
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at second left, New York 1939; and at third left, New York 1936
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1939
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1936
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York
1936
Gelatin silver print

Installation view of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at second right, Arm and Fan, New York 1937
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Bras et ventilateur, New York (installation view)
Arm and Fan, New York
1937
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Bras et ventilateur, New York
Arm and Fan, New York
1937
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Of New York… (installation view)
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1947
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Le retour au port, New York (installation view)
Return to port, New York
1944
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at left, Disappearance, New York 1955
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
La Disparition, New York (installation view)
Disappearance, New York
1955
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Disappearance, New York
1955
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
New York (installation view)
1969
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Text from the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours

Installation views of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing at left in the bottom image, Broken Bench, New York 1962
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Le Banc cassé, New York
Broken Bench, New York
1962
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Of New York… (installation view)
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Soixante ans de photographie (installation view)
Sixty years of photography
1912-1972
Paris, éditions du Chêne, 1972
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Jour pluvieux, Tokyo (installation view)
Rainy day, Tokyo
1968
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
McDougall Alley, New York (installation view)
1965
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Washington Square, New York
1954
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Washington Square, New York (installation view)
1954
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Washington Square, New York
1954
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Jardin d’hiver, New York (installation view)
Winter Garden, New York
1970
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Martinique
1972
Gelatin silver print

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Soixante ans de photographie (installation view)
Sixty years of photography
1912-1972
Paris, éditions du Chêne, 1972
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Dans la cave, Williamsburg (installation view)
In the cellar, Williamsburg
1951
Gelatin silver print
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Nara, Japan
1968
Gelatin silver print

Text from the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours

Harold Riley
André Kertész (installation view)
Manchester, The Manchester Collection, 1984
Collection Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of the exhibition L’equilibriste, André Kertész at Jeu de Paume, Château de Tours showing his late Polaroid work
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
12 December 1979 (installation view)
1979
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019
Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Untitled (installation view)
1979-1981
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019
Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
June 1979 (installation view)
1979
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019
Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
21 June 1979 (installation view)
1979
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019
Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
13 August 1979 (installation view)
1979
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019
Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
July 3, 1979 
1979
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019
Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Untitled
1979-1981
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019
Inkjet print from a reproduction of a polaroid, 2019

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
13 August
1983
Tirage jet d’encre d’après la reproduction d’un polaroid, 2019

Jeu de Paume at the Château de Tours
25 avenue André Malraux, 37000 Tours
Phone: 02 47 70 88 46

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Closed on Monday

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Exhibition: ‘André Kertész’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

Exhibition dates: 28th September 2010 – 6th February 2011

Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom
1917, printed in the 1980s
Gelatin silver print
Bibliothèque Nationale de France

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Tisza Szalka
1924
Vintage gelatin silver contact print
Salgo Trust for Education, New York

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Distortion n° 41
1933
[with André Kertész selportrait]
Gelatin silver print, later print
Collection of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris

Twenty-five years after his death, André Kertész (1894-1985) is today a world-famous photographer who produced images that will be familiar to everyone, but he has yet to receive full recognition for his personal contribution to the language of photography in the 20th century. His career spanning more than seventy years was chaotic, and his longevity was matched by an unwavering creative acuity that rendered difficult an immediate or retrospective understanding of his work.

This exhibition attempts to provide for the first time a broad and balanced view of Kertéz’s work, presenting new elements and bringing together, for the first time also, a large number of period prints (two thirds of the 300 photographs on show). Both the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue were produced in collaboration with The André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation (New York) and the Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine (Paris), which holds Kertész’s donation to the ministère de la Culture.

An initial investigation was undertaken during his lifetime as part of preparations for the first retrospective in 1985. The book Ma France (1990) paid tribute to his French donation and celebrated his Parisian periods (1925-1936 and after 1963), and the recent catalogue for the exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (2005), Washington, provided lots of circumstantial information and new analyses. With this retrospective exhibition, which draws extensively on archive documents, we have attempted to present Kertész’s work as a whole in its homogeneity and its continuity, as he himself conceived it, reflecting closely the course of his life.

Adopting a chronological and linear exhibition layout reflecting the various periods of his creative life, punctuated by self-portraits at the entrance to each space, we have created thematic groups in the form of “cells” highlighting the unique aspects of his output: his personal photography (the photographic postcards, the Distortions), his involvement in publishing (the book Paris vu par Kertész, 1934), his recurrent creative experiments (shadows, chimneys), and the more diffuse expression of emotions (solitude). The exhibition sheds light on the importance of previously neglected or unexplored periods (his time as a soldier between 1914 and 1918, the New York period and the Polaroids of his last years). In particular, it highlights the beginnings of photojournalism in Paris in 1928, and the dissemination of his photographs in the press, which had become a professional activity for him. Thus numerous copies of magazines are presented (Vu, Art et Médecine, Paris Magazine), as are the various publications of his photo essay on the Trappist monastery in Soligny, with Kertész’s original shots.

Press release from the Jeu de Paume website

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
The Eiffel Tower, Paris
1933
Vintage gelatin silver print
Courtesy Stephen Daiter Gallery

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Place de la Concorde
Paris, 1928, printed in the 1970s
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Robert Gurbo

A Small Journal

André Kertész (1894-1985) is today famous for his extraordinary contribution to the language of photography in the 20th century. This retrospective, which will be traveling to Winterthur, Berlin, and Budapest, marshals a large number of prints and original documents that highlight the exceptional creative acuity of this photographer, from his beginnings in Hungary, his homeland, to Paris, where between 1925 and 1936 he was one of the leading figures in avant-garde photography, to New York, where he lived for nearly fifty years without encountering the success that he expected and deserved. It pays tribute to a photographer whom Cartier-Bresson regarded as one of his masters, and reveals, despite an apparent diversity of periods and situations, themes and styles, the coherence of Kertész’s approach. It emphasises his originality and poetic uniqueness, drawing on new elements to present his oeuvre as the photographer himself conceived it, reflecting as closely as possible the course of his life. It makes full use of archive documents, focusing in particular on an area of his work that is little known (the beginnings of photo-reportage in Paris and the publication of his images in the press and books), and it analyses the circumstances surrounding his late resurgence. By exploring the recurring preoccupations and themes of Kertész’s work, it sheds light on the complex output of this unclassifiable photographer, who defined himself as an “amateur,” and in connection with whom Roland Barthes talked of a photography “that makes us think.”

Hungary 1894-1925: from Andor to André

Kertész’s youth left him with an enduring love of the countryside, animals, leisurely walks, and down-to-earth people. His sentimental nature led him to treat photography as “a little notebook, a sketchbook,” whose principal subjects were his friends, his family, his fiancée Elizabeth, and above all his younger brother, Jenö, with whom he carried out most of his early experiments in photography. Called up during the war, he continued to take photographs, capturing for the most part trivial events in the lives of the soldiers, whose situation he shared, for in spite of the context photography remained for him a way of expressing emotions. André Kertész was very independent at this time – his work diverged radically from the prevailing pictorialism of the time – and he was laying the foundations for a unique innovative photographic language. In 1914, he began photographing at night; in 1917, he took an astonishing photo of an underwater swimmer, and captured his brother “as a scherzo” in 1919. The two persons watching the Circus (1920) and The Blind Musician (1921) immediately emerged as modernist images. André Kertész’s photography was distinguished at this time by its freedom and diversity of approach, as well as its reliance on feelings and emotional bonds for inspiration.

France, 1925-1936: The Garden of André Kertész

Hard up and speaking only Hungarian, André Kertész lived in Paris amid a circle of fellow Hungarian émigrés. It was in the studio of one of them, Étienne Beöthy, that the dancer Magda Förstner, mimicking one of the artist’s sculptures, instigated the famous photograph Satiric Dancer in 1926. In the same year, when taking photographs at Mondrian’s studio, the photographer emerged as the master of a new type of unorthodox “portrait in absence.” Kertész evokes more than he shows, giving life to the inanimate, and creating a poetic language of allusive signs, both poetic and visual. During the early years of his life in Paris, he printed a large number of his images on photographic paper in postcard format (this inexpensive practice occupied a notable place in his work, because he resorted to it so persistently and with such inventiveness).

The street also provided the photographer with micro-events, fleeting associations and multiple signs that became metaphors. The leading representative, along with Man Ray, of international modernity in Paris, he worked for the press, initiating photo-reportage; he took part in several important exhibitions, including “Film und Foto” in Stuttgart in 1929. Kertész nevertheless insisted on retaining his independence, keeping artistic movements, in particular Surrealism, at arm’s length. Nourished by his emotions, surprises, and personal associations, his work, with its mirrored images, reflections, shadows, and doubles, established him as a leading exponent of avant-garde photography. But he nevertheless avoided conventional doctrines and styles. The Fork (1928), for example, a perfect application of the modernist creed that held sway at the time, reveals another distinguishing feature of Kertész’s work: his interest in shadows cast by objects or people. In The Hands of Paul Arma (1928) and the extraordinary Self-Portrait (1927), these play subtly on the alternation between absence and presence, doubling and disappearance.

André Kertész always sought to take advantage of innovations that would enable him to reconfigure reality through unusual images. He very quickly became interested in the optical distortions produced by waves (The Swimmer, 1917), or by the polished surfaces of such objects as silver balls or by car headlights. In 1930, when the magazine VU commissioned him to take a portrait of its new editor, Carlo Rim, Kertész took him to the funhouse at Luna Park to pose in front of the distorting mirrors. Then, in 1933, at the request of the editor of a girlie magazine, Le Sourire, he produced an extraordinary series of female nudes, known as Distortions. He used two models, who posed with two distorting mirrors that, depending on the vantage point chosen, produced grotesque elongations, monstrous protuberances, or the complete disintegration of the body. Following his move to the United States, Kertész hoped to make use of this technique by adapting it to advertising, but he was met with incomprehension (it was not until 1976 that a book devoted to the Distortions was published in American and French editions).

United States, 1936-1962: A Lost Cloud

The offer of a contract from the Keystone agency (which would be broken after one year) prompted Kertész’s to move to New York in October 1936. His reservations about fashion photography, the rejection of his photo essays that “talked too much” according to the editorial board of Life, and the incomprehension that greeted the Distortions series gradually plunged Kertész into depression. The war and the curtailment of the “foreign” photographer’s freedom merely added to his difficulties. In 1947, in order to have a regular income, Kertész was forced to accept a contract from the magazine House & Garden. In 1952, he moved into an apartment overlooking Washington Square, which prompted a change of direction in Kertész’s work. He now watched and witnessed what was taking place on the surrounding terraces and in the square. He used telephoto lenses and zooms to create whimsical series, such as the one featuring chimneys.

André Kertész lived in New York from 1936 to 1985 and he never stopped photographing “in” the city, rather than the city itself. He did not record the life of its neighbourhoods, the picturesque aspects of its various trades, and its often paradoxical architectural environments. For him, New York was a sound box for his thoughts, which the city echoed back to him in the form of photographs. He sought everywhere an antidote to the city’s regularity, in the dilapidated brick walls and the inextricable tangle of shadows, beams, and external staircases, and it is sometimes impossible to recognise specific places in these broken geometries: Kertész’s New York is highly fragmented, but a single photo could reveal the imaginary city.

He remained true to his intuitive, allusive personal style, and used his work to give voice to the sadness that undoubtedly permeated his entire life in New York, rendered most explicitly in The Lost Cloud (1937). Right up until the end of his life, he sought images of solitude, sometimes incorporating pigeons into them. On January 1, 1972, during a trip to Martinique, he caught the fleeting, pensive profile of a man behind a pane of frosted glass: this nebulous vision of a solitary man before the immensity of the sea was the last image in his retrospective collection, Sixty Years of Photography, 1912-1972, providing a very provisional conclusion to his career.

Returns and Renewal, 1963-1985

After his retirement in 1961, Kertész developed a new appetite for life and photography. Following a request from the magazine Camera for a portfolio, he made a sort of inventory of his available work. In 1963 he had one-man exhibitions at the Venice Photography Biennale and the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, the latter enabling him to stay in a city that, on an emotional level, he had never left. In addition, he located and took possession of several boxes of negatives that had been entrusted to a friend in 1936, at the time of his departure, which prompted a review of his entire oeuvre and led to new prints, with fresh croppings. These various episodes, which can be seen as part of a general reassessment of the value of photography and its history, had a rejuvenating effect on Kertész (who was seventy at the time). The traveling exhibition “The Concerned Photographer” even presented him as a pioneer of photojournalism.

Kertész continued his never-ending search for images, both in the cities that he visited and from the window of his apartment. His two books J’aime Paris (1974) and Of New York … (1976) express his sense of being torn between two cultures. The death of his wife Elizabeth in 1977, shortly before his one-man show at the Centre Georges Pompidou, led him to develop an interest in Polaroids, which enabled him to adopt a more introspective approach. As always, emotion was the driving force behind his work. Of the fifty-three Polaroids brought together in the small book From My Window, dedicated to Elizabeth, Kertész, always curious about new technology, was in reality capturing the light of his recollections and the distortions of his memory.”

Michel Frizot and Annie-Laure Wanaverbecq, curators of the exhibition

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Satiric Dancer
1926, printed in the 1950s
Gelatin silver print
Bibliothèque nationale de France

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Melancholic Tulip
New York, 1939, printed c. 1980
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery

André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985)
Lost Cloud, New York
1937, printed in the 1970s
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy Sarah Morthland Gallery, New York

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