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Auction archive: Lot number 59

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photographs
18 May 2017
Estimate
£30,000 - £50,000
ca. US$38,773 - US$64,623
Price realised:
£131,000
ca. US$169,312
Auction archive: Lot number 59

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Photographs
18 May 2017
Estimate
£30,000 - £50,000
ca. US$38,773 - US$64,623
Price realised:
£131,000
ca. US$169,312
Beschreibung:

Henri Cartier-Bresson Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris 1932 Gelatin silver print, printed 1947. Image: 35 x 24 cm (13 3/4 x 9 1/2 in.) Sheet: 35 x 28.3 cm (13 3/4 x 11 1/8 in.) Indistinctly numbered in an unidentified hand in pencil in the margin, titled, dated and annotated in unidentified hands in pencil, credit reproduction limitation and LIFE stamps, printed title, date, credit and Museum of Modern Art exhibition labels on the verso. Accompanied by a Certificate from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson signed by Agnès Sire, Director.
Provenance From the artist to the Museum of Modern Art, New York Time LIFE Archive, New York Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York To the present owner Exhibited The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson Museum of Modern Art, New York, 4 February - 6 April 1947 For another print Literature 'Speaking of Pictures: Cartier-Bresson Displays Eloquent Work', LIFE, 3 March 1947, p. 15, for the present lot Henri Cartier-Bresson, New York: Aperture Foundation, 1987, p. 39 J. Clair, Henri Cartier-Bresson Europeans, London: Thames & Hudson, 1998, p. 23 Henri Cartier-Bresson Paris, Reykjavik: Reykjavik Museum of Art, 2001, p. 16 M. Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2002, p. 263 P. Galassi et al., Henri Cartier-Bresson The Man, the Image and the World, London: Thames & Hudson, 2003, pl. 45 Henri Cartier-Bresson Scrapbook, Photographs 1932-1946, London: Thames & Hudson, 2006, pp. 86-87, uncropped variant P. Galassi, Henri Cartier-Bresson The Modern Century, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010, pl. 20a C. Chéroux, Henri Cartier-Bresson Here and Now, London: Thames & Hudson, 2014, pl. 63 Catalogue Essay ‘Photography is just luck. There was a fence, and I poked my camera through the fence. It’s a fraction of a second.’ Henri Cartier-Bresson In 1932, a young Henri Cartier-Bresson crouched behind the fence at Paris’s Saint-Lazare train station taking with his Leica camera what would become one of his most iconic images. At this time Cartier-Bresson was involved in the Surrealist movement, attending their meetings and taking in their notions of the role of the camera and image-making. The Surrealists were enamoured with the relationship between the city and the camera. In his Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929) André Breton argued that the camera functions as a type of gun and that ‘the simplest Surrealist act consists in going into the street, with a revolver in your hand, and shooting at random as often as possible into the crowd.’ And this is what Cartier-Bresson did. When he was not travelling on assignment, he was wandering the streets of Paris hunting for images. Clément Chéroux posits in the catalogue for the 2013 Pompidou retrospective that between 1929 and 1935, Cartier-Bresson was caught between the rigid teachings of André Lhote whose academy he had attended in 1927, and the liberty demanded by the Surrealists, seeking to create images in that space between mastery and intuition. This was achieved by his process of frst selecting a graphically interesting background then waiting for something striking to move into the frame. This combination of rigorous composition and signifcant content was what he would later coin the ‘decisive moment’, a term borrowed from Cardinal de Retz, a 17th century French priest. The Surrealists regarded composition and chance as a duality, and for Cartier-Bresson, the appeal of Surrealism was located in this openness to chance. ‘It is to Surrealism that I owe my allegiance and because it taught me to let the camera lens delve into the detritus of the unconscious and chance.’ Cartier-Bresson was a prisoner of war during the Second World War until his escape in 1943, then worked for the French resistance where he was assigned to record the German occupation and retreat. On his return to Paris in 1944, he discovered that many people thought he had died, including Nancy and Beaumont Newhall who were organising a posthumous exhibition for him in New York. Thrilled by the idea of showing previously unseen work, he helped prepare for the no longer posthumous 1947 MoMA exhibition, reviewing contact sheets and pasting 11 x 7 cm prints into a book he called Scrapbook. It was during this process that Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare was first discovered. Martine Franck explains in a handwritten letter, held at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson that ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson discovered this image of Gare Saint-Lazare in his contact sheets while preparing for his exhibition

Auction archive: Lot number 59
Auction:
Datum:
18 May 2017
Auction house:
Phillips
London
Beschreibung:

Henri Cartier-Bresson Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris 1932 Gelatin silver print, printed 1947. Image: 35 x 24 cm (13 3/4 x 9 1/2 in.) Sheet: 35 x 28.3 cm (13 3/4 x 11 1/8 in.) Indistinctly numbered in an unidentified hand in pencil in the margin, titled, dated and annotated in unidentified hands in pencil, credit reproduction limitation and LIFE stamps, printed title, date, credit and Museum of Modern Art exhibition labels on the verso. Accompanied by a Certificate from the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson signed by Agnès Sire, Director.
Provenance From the artist to the Museum of Modern Art, New York Time LIFE Archive, New York Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York To the present owner Exhibited The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson Museum of Modern Art, New York, 4 February - 6 April 1947 For another print Literature 'Speaking of Pictures: Cartier-Bresson Displays Eloquent Work', LIFE, 3 March 1947, p. 15, for the present lot Henri Cartier-Bresson, New York: Aperture Foundation, 1987, p. 39 J. Clair, Henri Cartier-Bresson Europeans, London: Thames & Hudson, 1998, p. 23 Henri Cartier-Bresson Paris, Reykjavik: Reykjavik Museum of Art, 2001, p. 16 M. Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2002, p. 263 P. Galassi et al., Henri Cartier-Bresson The Man, the Image and the World, London: Thames & Hudson, 2003, pl. 45 Henri Cartier-Bresson Scrapbook, Photographs 1932-1946, London: Thames & Hudson, 2006, pp. 86-87, uncropped variant P. Galassi, Henri Cartier-Bresson The Modern Century, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010, pl. 20a C. Chéroux, Henri Cartier-Bresson Here and Now, London: Thames & Hudson, 2014, pl. 63 Catalogue Essay ‘Photography is just luck. There was a fence, and I poked my camera through the fence. It’s a fraction of a second.’ Henri Cartier-Bresson In 1932, a young Henri Cartier-Bresson crouched behind the fence at Paris’s Saint-Lazare train station taking with his Leica camera what would become one of his most iconic images. At this time Cartier-Bresson was involved in the Surrealist movement, attending their meetings and taking in their notions of the role of the camera and image-making. The Surrealists were enamoured with the relationship between the city and the camera. In his Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929) André Breton argued that the camera functions as a type of gun and that ‘the simplest Surrealist act consists in going into the street, with a revolver in your hand, and shooting at random as often as possible into the crowd.’ And this is what Cartier-Bresson did. When he was not travelling on assignment, he was wandering the streets of Paris hunting for images. Clément Chéroux posits in the catalogue for the 2013 Pompidou retrospective that between 1929 and 1935, Cartier-Bresson was caught between the rigid teachings of André Lhote whose academy he had attended in 1927, and the liberty demanded by the Surrealists, seeking to create images in that space between mastery and intuition. This was achieved by his process of frst selecting a graphically interesting background then waiting for something striking to move into the frame. This combination of rigorous composition and signifcant content was what he would later coin the ‘decisive moment’, a term borrowed from Cardinal de Retz, a 17th century French priest. The Surrealists regarded composition and chance as a duality, and for Cartier-Bresson, the appeal of Surrealism was located in this openness to chance. ‘It is to Surrealism that I owe my allegiance and because it taught me to let the camera lens delve into the detritus of the unconscious and chance.’ Cartier-Bresson was a prisoner of war during the Second World War until his escape in 1943, then worked for the French resistance where he was assigned to record the German occupation and retreat. On his return to Paris in 1944, he discovered that many people thought he had died, including Nancy and Beaumont Newhall who were organising a posthumous exhibition for him in New York. Thrilled by the idea of showing previously unseen work, he helped prepare for the no longer posthumous 1947 MoMA exhibition, reviewing contact sheets and pasting 11 x 7 cm prints into a book he called Scrapbook. It was during this process that Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare was first discovered. Martine Franck explains in a handwritten letter, held at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson that ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson discovered this image of Gare Saint-Lazare in his contact sheets while preparing for his exhibition

Auction archive: Lot number 59
Auction:
Datum:
18 May 2017
Auction house:
Phillips
London
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