HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON
 

12 FEBRUARY - 9 JUNE 2014
GALERIE 2 , level 6

Centre Pompidou
75191 Paris cedex 04
telephone/00 33 (0)1 44 78 12 33
metro/Hôtel de Ville, Rambuteau

Through more than five hundred photographs, drawings, paintings, films and documents, the Centre Pompidou is devoting a completely new retrospective to the work of’ Henri Cartier-Bresson:the first in Europe since the artist’s death. The public are invited to journey through over seventy years of work that established the photographer as a key figure in modernity.

The exhibition reveals his work far beyond the “decisive moment” that long sufficed to sum up his genius for composition and skill in capturing movement. Ten years after his death, now that the thousands of prints he left to posterity have been brought together by the foundation that bears his name, the exhibition proposes a genuine reinterpretation of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work. The man known as «the eye of the century» was one of the great witnesses of our history.

The Centre Pompidou retrospective illustrates the depth and variety of his work and his wide-ranging career as a photographer – one that covered Surrealism, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, decolonisation and the Cold War. The exhibition features the photographer’s iconic pictures, but also puts the spotlight on lesserknown images. It reassesses a number of little-known photo reports, brings to light collections of paintings and drawings, and focuses on Cartier-Bresson’s forays into the world of film.

Both chronological and thematic, the circuit is structured around three main viewpoints: the period between 1926 and 1935, marked by his contact with the Surrealists, his early work as a photographer and his travels all over the world; a second section devoted to Cartier-Bresson’s political commitment when he returned from the US in 1936 until he set off for New York again in 1946, and a third sequence opening with the creation of Magnum Photos in 1947 and finishing with the early Seventies, when Cartier-Bresson stopped doing photo reports.A catalogue edited by Clément Chéroux, which is both a reference work and an attractive book, has been published by the Centre Pompidou to go with the retrospective.

Most of the major retrospectives dedicated to Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) in recent years have striven to define the unity of his vision. However, the photographer’s career was long: beginning at the end of the 1920s, it only ended at the dawn of the 21st century and saw various periods of development, making it difficult to reduce into one single stylistic entity. In contrast to these unifying approaches, this exhibition aims to show that there was not just one but several Cartier-Bressons. Until his death in 2004, all solo exhibitions supervised by the photographer featured photographs printed specifically for the occasion as a single set of prints in one or two formats, on paper of the same quality of grain, tonality and surface. This resulted in a great uniformity, which tended to even out the diversity of the work. This retrospective respects the historical temporality of the images’ production, by choosing, as far as possible, prints produced at the time they were taken. Encompassing Surrealism, May 1968, the Spanish Civil War, decolonisation and the thirty-year post-war boom, the exhibition chronologically retraces Cartier-Bresson’s journey. Ten years after his death, and from a body of work produced over several years, it presents, far beyond the myths and clichés, a reinterpretation of the immense body of images he left behind. Through more than 500 photographs, drawings, paintings, films and documents, bringing together his most iconic images, as well as the lesser-known, the exhibition intends to construct a history of his work and, through it, of the century.

Martine Franck, Paris, France, 1967
Silver gelatin print
Vintage print 30.2 x 44.8 cm
Eric and Louise Franck Collection, London
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation
Henri Cartier-Bresson

Linear accelerator, Stanford University,
United States, 1967
Silver gelatin print Printed in the 1970s 24.7 x 16.6 cm
Collection Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson,Paris
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos,courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Camagüey, Cuba, 1963
Silver gelatin print, vintage print Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson Collection,Paris
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Course cycliste «Les 6 jours de Paris», vélodrome,
Paris, France, November 1957
Silver gelatin print, vintage print Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson Collection, Paris
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

First paid holidays, banks of the Seine, France
1936
Silver gelatin print, printed in 1946
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson Collection,Paris

© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Rue de Vaugirard, Paris, France, May 1968
Silver gelatin print, printed in 1984
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson Collection,Paris
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos, courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Alberto Giacometti, Rue d’Alésia, Paris, France,
1961
Silver gelatin print, printed in 1962
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson Collection,Paris
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos,
courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Crowd waiting outside a bank to purchase
gold during the last days of the Kuomintang,
Shanghai, China, December 1948
Silver gelatin print, printed in the 1960s
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson Collection,Paris
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos,
courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Livorno, Tuscany, Italy, 1933
Silver gelatin print, printed in the 1980s
Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne,
Purchased thanks to sponsorship from Yves
Rocher, 2011, former Christian Bouqueret Collection, Paris
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos,courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Behind Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris, France, 1932
Silver gelatin print, printed in 1953
49.8 x 35.1 cm
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris
© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos,courtesy Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

> via centrepompidou.fr/en