Cartier-Bresson. Nápoles, Italia, 1960

Barcelona,

This summer it has been a decade since the MAPFRE Foundation presented in Madrid, then in collaboration with the Parisian Center Pompidou, a large anthology of Cartier-Bresson intended to serve as a reference for future analyzes carried out on the photographer’s work: it included with more than five hundred snapshots, drawings, paintings, films and documents that proved his initial pictorial vocation and his subsequent desire to bring the viewer closer to the reality of the most disadvantaged. In that retrospective, he argued that there is not just one Cartier-Bresson, but many: it was possible to trace his connection with surrealist aesthetics, his work as a militant photographer and his commitment to the French Communist Party and, finally, his work as a journalist. following the founding of the Magnum agency in 1947, in which he participated. This firm would become a pioneer in allowing its members to retain the rights to their images and freely choose the reports to work on, of evident quality.

Now Barcelona is the city to which the Foundation takes the production of this author, called the eye of the centurywith the support of Bucerius Kunst Fórum and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson: the exhibition “Watch! Watch! Watch!”, which today opened to the public at KBr, focuses, through images of all its stages, on his talent as an observer, both patient and agile, behind his 35 mm Leica, and on that evolution of his style beyond the concept of “decisive moment” for which many remember him; We will see his compositions under the influence of surrealism and the New Vision, his little-known photoreportages and his latest intimate prints, linked to his almost humanist conception of the profession.

Cartier-Bresson. Valencia, Spain, 1933

Raised in a family dedicated to the textile industry, Cartier-Bresson began to draw very early and, in times of creative effervescence and surrealist heyday in Paris, he went to train in the workshop of André Lothe, rubbing shoulders with Breton, Louis Aragon, Salvador Dalí or Max Ernst and letting himself be carried away by the attention they paid to dreams, fantasy and experimentation. After traveling to Africa in 1930, he decided to change his career and devote himself entirely to photography; He also traveled to Spain in the Republic, commissioned by vueand during the Civil War, in 1938, he made his earliest film here: Return to Lifeabout the medical care given to Republican soldiers, and two more documentaries. It must be emphasized that his first exhibition in our country took place as early as 1933, at the Ateneo de Madrid.

Cartier-Bresson. Seville, Spain, 1933

World War II would also leave its mark on him: in 1940 he was taken prisoner by German soldiers, he was sent to a work camp where he remained for three years and, upon his release, he joined the Resistance in his country: He is responsible for some of the first photographs of liberated Paris and another film about the release of those interned in concentration camps. 1947 was an important year in his career: his participation in the start of Magnum was accompanied by his first retrospective at the MoMA in New York; Since then, and until the seventies, he would combine his role as an international photojournalist – who attended the death of Gandhi, the rise to power of Mao, the Cuban Revolution or the most hostile episodes of the Cold War – with the taking of works of a more personal. His monograph dates back to 1952. Images à la sauvette (sneaky images), which in English received the title of The Decisive Moment in allusion to his love for capturing those moments before everything in a movement changes: a jump, a gust of wind.

Without abandoning the camera, he then returned, in the seventies, to the drawing of his early years and began to distance himself from the agency that he had helped create together with Robert Capa, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour, although we cannot consider those steps like a final introspection. The MoMA and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France dedicated important exhibitions to him in the eighties and 2000s, and his Foundation took its first steps before he died, in the Provençal town of Montjusin, in the summer of twenty years ago.

Diverse, as we said, in substance and form, Cartier-Bresson’s production now collected in Barcelona, ​​under the curator of Ulrich Pohlmann, seems to oscillate between anthropology and art and this montage wants to give it context. All the pieces that comprise it are original gelatin silver copies belonging to his French foundation, since the artist expressly prohibited reproductions of his work from being made after his death.

Cartier-Bresson. Behind the Saint-Lazare station, Place de Europa, Paris, France, 1932

The tour, structured in a dozen sections that are both thematic and chronological, begins with his aforementioned immersion, timid as he was, in surrealist circles, from where it seems he could have gotten the idea of ​​capturing objective chance. His early photos feature mannequins, sleeping people or hidden objects and, not much later, the traits of the New Vision will make their way into his style, in the form of unusual perspectives, fragmentation and attention to textures.

Cartier-Bresson. Sunday on the banks of the Seine, in Juvisy-sur-Orge, France, 1938

When, in the thirties, he began to work on reports, he did so in series rather than in individual pieces, the production of which he had to stop for a long period of time due to his disastrous war experiences, only to resume it immediately afterwards, in 1943. The dream digression had already lost meaning and Cartier turned to photojournalism, traveling halfway around the world and, in 1954, also to the USSR: he was the first Western photographer to enter the Soviet Union and his work there received strong criticism for not sufficiently reflecting the harsh living conditions of the population. When, in 1962, he went to East Berlin and Cuba, he did decide to capture human dramas and omnipresent socialist propaganda.

The photographer also traveled to the United States in the 1940s, when the laws of racial segregation had not lost validity: he portrayed Luther King and Malcolm X and captured the daily effects of discrimination on the black population and demonstrations for equality (the summary of those American trips he collected it in the volume America in Passing); Not much later, he began to be interested in the links between humans and machines in a work context, in compositions that contrasted with the very numerous ones he dedicated to all types of leisure moments.

Cartier-Bresson. Coronation of George VI, London, England, 1937

Other important chapters of his career examined in this Barcelona exhibition are his images of the behavior of the masses at sporting events, demonstrations or political events (although he tried to make his work apolitical, it is possible to appreciate his sympathy for rebellion); his street photographs, many focused on the omnipresence of advertising and consumerism, some on the development of the outskirts of Paris; the portraits of writers and artists usually immersed in a narrative context that said a lot about them; or travel reports, such as those he developed in Basilicata (Italy), when some people still lived there in caves; in bombed Hamburg or in our Castilian cities in the fifties.

Cartier-Bresson. The Wall in West Berlin, Germany, 1962

Cartier-Bresson. Naples, Italy, 1960

Henri Cartier-Bresson. “Watch! Watch! Watch!”

KBr MAPFRE FOUNDATION

Avenida del Litoral, 30

Madrid

From October 11, 2024 to January 26, 2025

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