Word: brassai
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...HENRY Miller dubbed Brassai "The Eye of Paris." Nearly forty years later, long after the obscure young painter had become an internationally famous photographer, Lawrence Durrell could still write that Brassai was a "child of Paris, and in some way the city's most faithful biographer...
...Brassai was born Gyula Halasz in 1900 in Brasso, a village in Hungarian Transylvania. He arrived in Paris in 1924 after art studies in Budapest and Berlin, determined to make his fortune as a painter. Not until the age of thirty did he hold a camera. His interest in photography grew quickly, however, as he discovered that with a camera he could capture and portray the restless energy and labyrinthine density of Paris. Finally he could fix forever the flickering images he saw in the subterranean night world of cafes and bars that so fascinated him. He became a photographer...
...Still, Brassai is not a parochial artist as the sixtytwo photographs on display in M.I.T.'s Hayden Gallery brilliantly prove. Brassai's works confront us as documents and as works of art. They present the appearance of a specific moment in history yet manage to escape a pernicious topicality. Brassai takes pictures that beckon us to return again and again, like his portrait of a peasant sleeping on a train, oblivious to the landscape whizzing by outside his window, his worn and grizzled head thrown back against the seat, his mouth a gaping black hole. Or his photograph of Kiki...
...ORGANIZERS of the M.I.T. exhibit have deliberately chosen works that reveal the range and variety of Brassai's interests. There are scenes of Paris at night and portraits of Brassai's friends and fellow artists--Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Giacometti--surrounded in their studios by their paintings and tools. Several examples of Brassai's graffiti, pictures of the signs and symbols men have carved into or painted on the urban environment to proclaim their existence, are shown...
There is also a section devoted to twelve of Brassai's experiments with cliche verre. These pictures are perhaps the most interesting in the exhibit because they are the least known. The cliche verre process consists basically of scratching lines on a glass plate that has been covered with a thick emulsion and then placing the plate over photographic paper and exposing it to light. The light is able to penetrate through the scratch marks, but not the emulsion and creates a print on the paper. Brassai combined the man-made images created by cliche verre with mechanically produced photographs...