Brassaï - Important Art
Hungarian-born, French Photographer, Draftsman, Sculptor, Writer, and Filmmaker
Movements and Styles: Street Photography, Photojournalism, Straight Photography, Documentary Photography, Surrealism
Born: September 9, 1899 - Brassó, Transylvania, Austria-Hungary
Died: July 8, 1984 - Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France
Important Art by BrassaïThe below artworks are the most important by Brassaï - that both overview the major creative periods, and highlight the greatest achievements by the artist. | |
 Artwork Images | Enlarged Objects: Matches (c. 1930)Artwork description & Analysis: This close-shot of five wooden matches set against a printed text was intended to illustrate a story in issue 10 of Paris Magazine, published in June 1932. It was the first photograph Brassaï contributed to the magazine and was unlike the many others he contributed which typically captured some form of social or moral transgression. In this image, there seems to be an implicit play between object and text, as they are both cropped and juxtaposed to entice the viewer to look and speculate on the potential for the image's meaning(s). This "uprooted photograph," as photo-historian Peter Galassi named it, becomes something of a mystery, or suggests, unintended meanings that amused the readers of the popular press as well as the Surrealists who tried to take ownership of this curious type of imagery. Gelatin Silver Print - Brassaï Archive |
 Artwork Images | The stream snaking down the empty street (1930-32)Artwork description & Analysis: Brassaï was, in the words of photo-historian Christian Bouqueret, the photographer "of a new world," that being, a world "where night is no longer night and where light brutally and loudly bursts forth [...] making things visible where before there was only speculation." In this picture, Brassaï was fascinated by the way electric light shone on the street pavement revealing the undulating pattern of cobblestones that both defined the gutter and guided the stream of sewer water down the deserted street. He allowed the indirect lighting on the pavement to soften the effect of the bright streetlights. Photogravure - Musée d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris |
 Artwork Images | Paris Street (1937)Artwork description & Analysis: The cyclist (a delivery boy) has stopped to admire an enlarged headshot of the iconic German film star Marlene Dietrich which adorns the side of a building. Brassaï's street photography was usually precise and descriptive of how people moved about and interacted with the Parisian cityscape. As Brassaï eloquently explained: he had "always sought to immobilize movement, to freeze it in physical form, to give people and things that grandiose immobility of which only cataclysms and death are capable." Unlike, say, Walker Evans or Berenice Abbott, Brassaï did not however treat everyday signage - shop signs, cheap cafés, and advertisements and so on - as meaningful vernacular objects. Rather, he was fascinated by Paris per se: but in its mundane details (e.g. the pavement, street lamps), found objects (e.g. metro tickets) and in the behavior of the different social classes. In the words of Brassaï's friend, Henry Miller, "the walls, the griffonages, the human body, the amazing interiors, all these separate and interrelated elements of the city form in their ensemble a gigantic labyrinthian excavation." As rich in poetic images as Paris was, Brassaï's focus on everyday scenes also fulfilled the more practical demands of meeting commissions for the illustrated press. Gelatin Silver Print |
 Artwork Images | Couple hommes au bal "Magic-City", Paris (1932)Artwork description & Analysis: Identity appears enigmatic in this photograph of an elegant upper middle-class couple dancing together. On close inspection, we notice that the woman is in fact a man dressed as a lady: wearing satin gown, long gloves, a neck ruff, a hat, and a veil. Her male partner wears tails, replete with a bow tie and a white handkerchief in his breast pocket. They are crowded-in by other dancing couples who compete for space on the dance floor but they are clearly enjoying the occasion. This photograph was included among the 46 photographs published in the book Voluptés de Paris (Pleasures of Paris), the same book Brassaï disowned on publication because of the inclusion of lurid picture descriptions. Gelatin Silver Print - Victoria and Albert Museum, London |
 Artwork Images | Nude (1931-34)Artwork description & Analysis: Brassaï transforms the female nude body into geometrical lines, curves and shapes, suggestive of its corporeality. He focused on the woman's torso twisted at an angle to reveal the outline of her hip, waist, and breast. The woman's head and legs are cropped, and the twisted angle of her torso makes her body seem like a floating organic form. Brassaï has further abstracted her body as he has cut out this image and placed it on a neutral ground (textile) to underscore the sensation of floating in a reverie of desire. Nude was accompanied by Maurice Raynal's essay on the "Diversity of the human body" published in the first issue of the Surrealist magazine Minotaure in 1933 though Brassaï considered the surreal aspect of his images as nothing more than "the real rendered fantastic by vision." Gelatin Silver Print - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
 Artwork Images | Madam Bijoux in the Bar de la Lune, Montmartre, Paris (1932)Artwork description & Analysis: Here Brassaï presents Madam Bijoux, well known in the Parisian demi-monde as a glamorous and flamboyant elderly woman. She looks straight into the camera, engaging the gaze of the photographer, and she is dressed-to-the-nines in her worn out clothes and jewels. She sits with a half-lit cigarette in her hands and a glass of wine on the table in front of her at the nightclub Bar de la Lune in Montmartre. She exudes a fallen social status. In Brassaï's own kind words: "Behind her glittering eyes, still seductive, lit with the lights of the Belle Époque, as if they had escaped the onslaughts of age, the ghost of a pretty girl seemed to smile out." Gelatin Silver Print - Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris |
 Artwork Images | Picasso by the Stove, rue des Grands Augustins, Paris (1939)Artwork description & Analysis: The legendary Spanish painter Pablo Picasso sits smoking in a chair next to a large stove that casts its enormous shadow behind him, accentuating his presence. Brassaï took this photograph in the stable that Picasso used as his Paris studio during World War II. Brassaï explained, "I wanted to photograph him in his new studio, which he was not yet living in, and in the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Près, where he had been a regular for five years... I also took some of him seated next to the enormous potbelly stove with its long flue pipe, bought from a collector.... He is delighted by the portrait of him with his extraordinary stove, a portrait that later appeared in Life [magazine]" Gelatin Silver Print - Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris |
 Artwork Images | Love from Graffiti Series VI (1933-56)Artwork description & Analysis: This hand-carved heart engraved with the initials L-A was found by Brassaï on a concrete wall in a working-class district of Paris. It captured Brassaï's imagination and he considered graffiti the contemporary city's "primitive art." The image records for posterity an indelible mark of loving affection, but more telling perhaps is Brassaï's comparison between, in the words of curator Anne Wilkes Tucker, "the caveman's painted bison, studded with arrows, to the initialed hearts ravaged by fury [which are] both initiated by the desire for magical powers". Brassaï's intentional framing of the image transformed the randomly arranged lines on a wall into symbols for animistic narratives. Gelatin Silver Print - Victoria and Albert Museum, London |
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Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
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Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
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First published on 09 Nov 2018. Updated and modified regularly. 
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