Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ex-Photographer

Long before he took up the camera, Henri Cartier-Bresson, like many other acclaimed photographers, was first attracted to drawing and painting as means of portraying the world around him. As a young child he had visited the studio of his uncle, Louis Cartier-Bresson, a painter whose early promise was ended by his death in World War I. This brief introduction to the art of painting ignited in Henri a lifelong passion.

Cartier-Bresson began his career by studying painting as a young man under the noted French artist André Lhote. Some works from this early period survive, including a view of Lhote's studio painted in 1927. In this canvas (now in a private collection in Paris), a nude woman reclines on a bed in a mostly empty room. The overall geometry of the composition reflects the cubist influence of Lhote, while mysterious objects--a lonely seashell in the foreground, a screen dominating the background, and a schematic depiction of a staircase that seems to lead nowhere--show a distinct awareness of surrealism, an important movement that was still in its infancy when Cartier-Bresson took up his paintbrush.

In the early 1930s, however, Cartier-Bresson's career went in an unexpected direction when, on a 1931 trip to Africa, he took his first photographs. His use of a Leica 35mm camera after 1932 offered him mobility and spontaneity in his search for images. Cartier-Bresson always strove to capture the "decisive moment," the instant that preserved the distilled meaning or essence of a particular event. In the decades that followed, his photographs became famous for the stories they told, with his unerring eye documenting both public dramas and private moments around the world over much of the 20th century. Indeed, his style and methods informed the young art of photojournalism.

Cartier-Bresson's first exhibition of photographs was held in 1933 in New York City's Julian Levy Gallery, a venue that did much to introduce surrealism to America. The Museum of Modern Art, also in New York, presented a retrospective exhibition of his photographs in 1946, and since that time he has been widely regarded as one of the world's most important living photographers.

Although Cartier-Bresson had left the painter's easel behind, he continued to maintain a presence in the art world. He counted many of the leading artists of his generation among his friends, and the subjects of his portraits include such eminent painters as Pablo Picasso, Pierre Bonnard, Max Ernst, and Georges Rouault, as well as the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Alberto Giacometti. Indeed Henri Matisse, one of the most important artists of the 20th century, will largely be remembered just as Cartier-Bresson captured him on film, as an elderly man surrounded by birdcages in his Vence, France, studio.

Having reached the pinnacle of success in his chosen field, Cartier-Bresson then did what few others have had the courage to do: He returned to his first passion, drawing. After making the decision in the early 1970s to devote his remaining energies to drawing, Cartier-Bresson has used the intervening 30 years to produce a large body of work, which serves to document the seriousness of his purpose.

Photography and drawing are, however, fundamentally different media necessitating radically different approaches. As a photographer, Cartier-Bresson traveled the world, seemingly seeking "prey" that he then captured in the instantaneous click of a shutter. Drawing, on the other hand, requires patience and prolonged observation in one place. To hone his skills, he spent months in the mid-1970s frequenting Paris's museum of natural history, the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, sketching specimens from the collection. A notable example of the series of drawings that he completed there is housed in the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, which also is in Paris. Rather than capturing the interactions of an instant or making a subtle social observation, as he had done for years in his photographs, Cartier-Bresson dwells in this intimate work on the timeless bones of long-dead ancient beasts, allowing his eye to linger and study them both as material objects and abstract forms in three-dimensional space.

While photographs describe reality in sharp contours with objective precision, Cartier-Bresson's drawings use an agitated line to build images stroke by stroke. For example, in his 1979 portrait of the French poet Yves Bonnefoy (also in the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne), a network of fluidly drawn pencil lines coalesces to form the features of the subject with an economy of detail. The sparseness of the composition focuses attention on Bonnefoy's eyes, as if drawing the viewer directly into the sitter's thoughts through the medium of the artist.

In addition to his incisive portraits, favored themes for Cartier-Bresson's drawings include the French landscape, the streets of Paris, and the female nude. This latter subject, which has consumed much of his attention in later years, was rarely a focus of Cartier-Bresson's camera.