Rarely has the phrase “man of the world” been more aptly applied than to the protean photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, the subject of a handsome and large - though surely not large enough - retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
For much of his long career as a photojournalist, which began in the 1930s and officially ended three decades before his death in 2004, Cartier-Bresson was compulsively on the move. By plane, train, bus, car, bicycle, rickshaw, horse and on foot, he covered the better part of five continents in a tangled, crisscrossing itinerary of arcs and dashes.
In addition to being exhaustively mobile, he was widely connected. Good-looking, urbane, the rebellious child of French haute bourgeois privilege, he networked effortlessly, and had ready access to, and friendships with, the political and culture beau monde of his time. Nehru, Matisse, Jacqueline Kennedy, T. S. Eliot, Truman Capote, George Balanchine, Coco Chanel and Alberto Giacometti sat for portraits.
The third and crucial constant in his career was, of course, a camera: in Cartier-Bresson’s case, a handheld Leica, as neat and sleek as a pistol. His working method, so focused on the shutter moment, set a model for modern photojournalism, a field he basically invented. Equally influential was the way he approached that moment: with a Zen combination of alertness and patience that allowed him to be absorbed by unfolding events as they absorbed him.
Some of these events were small and sweet: lovers smooching, a kid zooming by on a bike. Others were huge. In 1945 he was in Germany in the aftermath of World War II. (He had spent almost three years as a prisoner of war in German camps.) In 1948 he was in Shanghai when citizens were storming banks for gold in the last frantic days before Communist forces arrived. He witnessed the end of the British Raj. He photographed Gandhi just before he was assassinated, then documented the funeral.
There’s some of all of this in the Museum of Modern Art retrospective, “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century,” which unfolds in 13 thematic sections. All but the first are chronologically mixed, and the pictures in that opening section, almost all from the 1930s, are some of the freshest he ever made. He was in his 20s then. Raised in Paris, he had ambitions to be an artist. He studied with a painter who worked in a late- Cubist style, but hung out in the Surrealist circle around Andre Breton, soaking up leftist politics and heterodox aesthetics.
In 1930, with his painting prospects looking dim , he picked up a camera. An early piece in the retrospective, a 1932 shot of a man passed out on a Paris street, might be taken as a formative experiment of street photography. And Surrealism naturally had its impact: his shots of light-bleached plazas and factory walls are pure De Chirico.
After seeing photos of Africa by an older colleague, Martin Munkacsi (1896-1963), Cartier-Bresson headed there in 1930 . By mid-decade he had gone from Africa back to France, then to Italy, Spain, Mexico and the United States. Many of his signature works are from this period: Mexico City prostitutes squeezing through windows; a Spanish child seemingly gripped by an ecstatic fit (he was looking up at a ball thrown out of camera range); a quartet of stout French picnickers lounging by a river.
He was given gallery shows, though he already knew he wasn’t making gallery art. He insisted that he wasn’t making art at all. His photographs were certainly ephemeral and unprecious; he meant them for mass publication, for practical use.
The retrospective gathers works of various dates in each section, thus avoiding a stark comparison between early and late career.
What’s missing? Cumulative intensity. It’s present in isolation: in the throbbing 1946 shot of a mother and son reunited and weeping on a New York City dock, and in the large, ashen print that opens the exhibition, a 1962 shot of a funeral in Paris for protesters killed in a demonstration for Algerian independence. But in the show over all, surprisingly little tension builds .
A capacious, in-the-now eye and the sheer joie de vivre were - are - Cartier-Bresson’s pioneering and sustaining strengths. At MoMA, he is so much and so everywhere that he appears to be nowhere. But while slipping from our grasp, he keeps handing us the world.
HOLLAND COTTER
