Word: kertesz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...superb Andre Kertesz exhibition currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago is that rare thing, an art world vindication that the artist is around to enjoy. When Kertesz arrived in the U.S. in 1936, he was 42. He had behind him a celebrated body of work in photography. During eleven years in France, and before that in his native Hungary, he had perfected one of the camera's fundamental charms, its ability to fix those brief entanglements of form and event that escape the eye. Netting perishable moments in a deft geometry, he practiced photography...
...work, that his rehabilitation got under way. In recent years, through books and smaller exhibits, his stock has risen further. The Chicago show, which travels in December to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, caps the long effort to re store his fame. Today, at 90, Kertesz still aims a zoom lens from the balcony of his Manhattan apartment, and he was in Chicago to be toasted at his exhibition's opening...
...Paris of Kertesz's early career was the cockpit of modernism, where surrealists, Dadaists and constructivists fanned the air with their manifestos. Kertesz felt the breeze but sailed his own course. He absorbed the lessons of constructivism, without becoming an arctic formalist. His fellow Hungarian expatriate Laszlo Moholy-Nagy could turn people into compositional load bearers upholding a grand design. Kertesz linked his formal sense to benign temperament. Joining elegant compositions to gentle human anecdotes, he achieved a formalism with the juice still flowing...
Sidestepping the familiar monuments of Paris, Kertesz sought candid bits of street life, preferably from a high vantage point, where he could inspect the world without engaging it. He had a geometer's orientation: in many of his best shots, people are distant figures, elegantly distributed among the grids and arcs of the city. The Paris that issued from his camera was not the serene city of Atget, immemorial and mostly unpeopled. Neither was it Brassai's close-in platform for the dramas of the demimonde. Kertesz's Paris was like the woman in his picture Satiric Dancer: pert, ironic...
...camera. He was a highly innovative fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, snapping his models in the midst of wild-eyed elephants or striding in the rain. But it was his still and startlingly somber portraiture of celebrities and friends that established him, along with Andre Kertesz, Irving Penn, Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith and Ansel Adams, as one of the most important photographers in the world...