Brassaï

(click to enlarge)
"‘Bijoux' in Place Pigalle Bar," by Brassaï, 1932. (credit: Brassai — Rapho/Photo Researchers)

(born Sept. 9, 1899, Brassó, Transylvania, Austria-Hungary — died July 8, 1984, Eze, France) Hungarian-born French photographer, poet, and sculptor. His pseudonym derives from his native city. In 1924 he settled in Paris, where he became acquainted with Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Salvador Dalí. He earned his living as a journalist and found it necessary to use a camera for his assignments. In the 1930s he became known for his dramatic photographs of Paris nightlife. Books of his photographs, including Paris After Dark (1933) and Pleasures of Paris (1935), brought him international fame.

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Brassaï (Gyula Halasz; 1899-1984), French photographer. Born in Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), he moved to France in 1924 to work as an artist. He had received formal training in Budapest and in Berlin, where he met Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, and Kokoschka, but was drawn to the lyricism and decay of Paris, the city whose image he would amplify through his photographs.

Soon after arriving, he adopted the name Brassaï, after Brasso, the village of his birth. In 1926 he met his countryman André Kertész who, already working as a photojournalist, introduced Brassaï to photography, and in 1929 Brassaï began contributing images to the French illustrated Vu, which also published photographs by Kertész, Man Ray, and others. In 1932 Brassaï was commissioned to photograph Picasso's sculptures for the first issue of Minotaure, the Surrealist journal. This marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship, resulting in several photographic books, notably Les Sculptures de Picasso (1948) and Conversations avec Picasso (1964). Brassaï continued to photograph for Minotaure until the magazine's collapse in 1939. His cryptic handling of the female nude, and a series of photographs of discarded bus tickets and other refuse, entitled Sculptures involontaires, earned Brassaï the status of an honorary Surrealist. He had also supplied André Breton with street views of Paris for his experimental novel Nadja (1928). Brassaï's association with Surrealism has greatly coloured his reputation as a photographer. His series of night photographs Paris de nuit (1933), which depict an underworld of prostitutes, homosexuals, and vagrants, are often considered a representation of the social subconscious.

Brassaï won early recognition as an art photographer, participating in the show Modern European Photographers at Julian Levy's gallery, New York, in 1932. His first one-man exhibition was held at the Arts et Métiers Graphiques, Paris, in 1933, and travelled to the Batsford Gallery, London, the same year. This success paralleled a steady output of commercial work. Throughout the 1930s, Brassaï worked for Verve, Labyrinth, Lilliput, Coronet, Life, and other magazines. Prevented from working during the German occupation, Brassaï turned to drawing. In 1945, at the end of the war, an exhibition of his drawings appeared in Paris (published as Trente dessins in 1946). Also that year, with Robert Doisneau, Édouard Boubat, Willy Ronis, and other humanistic photographers, he helped to re-form the agency Rapho, signalling his return to photography.

Brassaï's greatest legacy as a photographer, however, stems from a series of monographs on various aspects of Parisian life: Paris de nuit; Voluptés de Paris (1934); Camera in Paris (1949); Graffiti (1960); and Le Paris secret des années 30 (1976). While other photographers had published similar works during the 1930s, notably Kertész (Paris vu par André Kertész, 1934), Brassaï's output demonstrates the broadest insight into the city, earning him a second pseudonym, ‘the eye of Paris’, coined by Henry Miller in 1933.

— Kevin Moore

Bibliography

• Brassaï, Letters to my Parents (1997).
• Tucker, A. W., Brassaï: The Eye of Paris (1999).
• Sayag, A., and Lionel-Marie, A. (eds.), Brassaï: The Monograph (2000)