Temperaments: Memoirs of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Other Artists by Hofstadter Daniel

Author:Hofstadter, Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504008082
Publisher: Open Road Distribution

Postscript

“Je suis un timide”—“I am a timid man,” Henri Cartier-Bresson said to me once as we were strolling together down a slope not far from Forcalquier, in Provence. The confession astonished me, but he would repeat it often, a little wistfully. In 1988, I’d been sent by the New Yorker to write a profile of him, a commission that ended by claiming almost a year of my life; it precedes this postscript. During that time this fairish, lanky, rather elegant Norman gentleman told me a great deal about his background and his achievement, and since I had admired his work since childhood I couldn’t see how timidity could have played the slightest part in his life behind the camera. Today, perhaps, I do.

Cartier-Bresson’s memory was honored at the Museum of Modern Art in the spring of 2010 with a comprehensive exhibition dedicated to his role as a consummate professional. In the midst of this pleasurable and sensible tribute, however, one might almost have forgotten that there is another way of considering Cartier-Bresson’s achievement, somewhat apart from the confines of his photojournalistic profession. For he was deeply immersed in the fine arts as well. He spent his first creative decade drawing and painting, studying with André Lhote and Jacques-Émile Blanche, and in his sixties he returned to drawing as his primary activity, attending to it almost every day for the remaining years of his life (he died in 2004 at the age of 95). Many of his closest friends were artists—the Giacometti brothers, Alberto and Diego; the sculptor Pierre Josse; the Parisian painters Sam Szafran and Avigdor Arikha; the Viennese Georg Eisler; the English sculptor Raymond Mason. Cartier-Bresson distinguished himself only in photography, but his camera work, and indeed his entire aesthetic, is almost as closely related to the development of painting as it is to that of the photographic image.

Cartier-Bresson did not study art history systematically, but he had a way of mentally and almost instantaneously registering the compositional structure of any pictorial work he liked. That meant especially van Eyck, Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Poussin, Cézanne, and Alberto Giacometti. I have mentioned that once Cartier-Bresson told me that Léonor Fini, the Surrealist painter and set designer, physically attacked him in Venice. I do not know exactly when this attentat occurred. I do remember, however, that Fini, whom I had met at several gallery openings and who died in 1996, was an excitable Triestina with a great head of corkscrewy hair on permanent holiday. Fini had tried to push Henri into the Grand Canal because he hated Caravaggio. At the time I thought nothing of this anecdote, which I put down as mere old folks’ shenanigans. Today, however, it seems to have a certain significance.

Cartier-Bresson’s dislike of Caravaggio extended to most subsequent Baroque painting: just as he usually found himself underwhelmed by staged photographic imagery—the kind where everything is posed and lighted in advance—Baroque theatricality put him off. He once admitted to me, for instance, that he had never been

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