Word: brassai
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Jacob, Eluard, Breton, Sabartès, Gertrude Stein-almost all the friends and legendary figures who made the "heroic" years of the French avant-garde and constituted the tribunal against which Picasso could measure himself-are dead. "When I see you," he recently told one friend, Photographer Georges Brassai, "my first reaction is to reach in my pocket for a package of cigarettes to offer you one, like the old days. I know very well that we don't smoke any more. Age has obliged us to renounce them, but the desire remains! Same thing for making love...