Brassaï is known as the photographer of Paris for being one of the first to take in-depth portraits of this prolific city of artists. A contemporary and friend of other great creators such as Picasso, Matisse or Dalí, Brassaï was a painter, illustrator, journalist, film director, sculptor, poet and above all, a photographer.
Thanks to his photographs we see the portrait of an era, of a city, its relationship with art and with the people who inhabit it night and day, upper and lower class.
Brassaï is the eye of Paris, the portrait of a city that never sleeps.
INSIDE THIS ARTICLE... ? [ Hide ]
- 1 Brassaï: Biography
- 1.1 Brassaï in Paris
- 2 Awards
- 3 Work by Brassaï
- 3.1 Paris de Nuit
- 3.2 Portraits of Brassai
- 3.3 Graffiti
- 4 Quotes from Brassai
- 5 Brassaï photo exhibition
- 6 Brassai Books
BRASSAÏ: BIOGRAPHY
Brassaï was born in 1899 in Brasov, Hungary (today belonging to Romania), the place from which he created his pseudonym (Brassaï means "from Brasso" or Brasov) since his original name is Gyula Halász.
He studied painting and fine arts in the city of Budapest, and later fought in the First World War on the Austro-Hungarian side until the end of the war, when he moved to Berlin.
In 1920 he settled in Berlin as a journalist where he also studied at the Berlin University of the Arts.
In 1924 he moved to Paris, a city that fell in love with him and where he developed his entire career. He died in 1984 in the south of France.
BRASSAI IN PARIS
Brassaï moved to Paris with the intention of painting, but quickly substituted one art for another and ended up focusing mainly on photography. The undisputed protagonist of his work is the city of Paris, especially at night, but also its people, their customs and their objects.
In Paris, he settled in the bohemian neighborhood of Montparnasse, where he related to many other artists such as Picasso, Dalí, Matisse, André Bretón or Jean Genet. There he mainly practiced photography, although he also worked sporadically as an illustrator and journalist.
Although his work focuses on Paris, he also worked as a photographer for the famous American magazine Harper's Bazaar .which led him to travel and photograph France and many other places, such as the United States, Sweden, Spain or Brazil.
AWARDS
1956: Most Original Film at the Cannes Film Festival with Tant qu'il aura des bêtes .
1957: Gold medal of the Venice Biennale.
1978: French National Photography Grand Prix.
BRASSAI WORK
Brassaï's photographs focus mainly on the city of Paris, to which he dedicated practically all his photographic work. Most of his images were taken with medium format cameras, which is why he always used a tripod and took great care of his compositions.
His photographs are based on everyday events and he has great visual power. He used the light available at the time, looking for a contrast between light and shadow and giving rise to very suggestive and elegant images.
He focused on the streets of Paris, but also on people and objects, from cacti to graffiti, cobblestones, or lampposts. Her photographs show the imprint of the human being whether it appears in them or not.
NIGHT PARIS
It is probably his best known work and the one that elevated him as one of the best photographers of the 20th century.
Paris de Nuit was commissioned by the publisher Charles Peignot to Brassaï, who collected a series of photographs of Paris by night in the form of a publication. This book reaped great success and gave him fame.
His black and white photographs show a vibrant and suggestive city, full of contrast, life and light, but also peace and mystery. They abound in fog, rain, darkness, light, silhouettes and shadows.
To take these photos, Brassaï used a Voigtlander Bergheil camera, which required a tripod due to the long exposure times needed to get a correct exposure .
The success of his work in Paris at night led him to work for one of the most prestigious art publications of the time, Minotaure , a meeting place for surrealism and great artists such as Picasso, Duchamp, Miró, Max Ernst, Diego Rivera, René Magritte. , etc.
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris
As an inseparable part of the city, Brassaï focused on the human being who inhabited it. From large bourgeois celebrations in places like the Ritz, to bars, brothels, street vendors, established and street artists and all kinds of professions.
PORTRAITS OF BRASSAI
Brassaï's portraits have a great ability to capture the personality of his models, to convey closeness and naturalness. Many of her portraits were well-known people or from the intellectual circle in which she moved.
But he also portrayed unknown people, from night and day Paris, from low and high class. Brassaï had the gift of making his everyday protagonists representative of universal themes.
© Estate Brassaï Succession, Paris
THE GRAFFITI
Brassaï was a pioneer in raising the art of graffiti, dedicating himself to collecting what he found on the walls of the city.
Scratches and graffiti often made in chalk that he photographed with the desire to preserve and that fascinated the photographer.
In this video you will be able to see how these archaic graffiti influenced the photographer's work but also that of his friend Picasso:
BRASSAI QUOTES
Knowing a photographer also by his words and not only by his images, adds much more depth to our knowledge of the artist. These are some of his famous phrases from him:
The night suggests, he does not teach. The night finds us and surprises us by its strangeness; it releases in us the forces that, during the day, are dominated by reason.
My sole purpose was to express reality. There is nothing more surreal than reality itself and if it fails to fill us with wonder it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.
The opportunity is always there. We all make use of it. The difference is that a bad photographer finds one out of hundreds, while a good photographer does it all the time.
The purpose of art is to give people a higher level of consciousness.
Graffiti is an indestructible stone destined for eternity
There is always the danger of prostituting one's gifts, simply to live and survive. The hardest thing in life is making money working on what you like to do.
BRASSAÏ PHOTO EXHIBITION
One of the most extensive and complete Brassaï exhibitions was that of the year 2000 organized by the George Pompidou Centerand which exhibited more than 400 works by the artist.
In Spain, the Mapfre Foundation mounted exhibitions both in Madrid and Barcelona and at the Reina Sofía Museumwhere topics such as Brassaï's relationship with surrealism were addressed.
The Picasso Museum in Malagahe also carried out a very complete retrospective of Brassaï. To this day there are no planned exhibitions on this photographer, although it is worth looking for information from time to time and going to see one if the opportunity arises.
BRASSAI BOOKS
There is not much bibliography on Brassaï, but we can find some copies (sometimes second-hand) of some of his works.
Paris de Nuit: This book, published in 1932, made him one of the great and most recognized Parisian artists, and shows his photographs of the Parisian night. It consists of 62 pages and you can buy it second hand for around €90.
Brassai. Paris & Picasso: This book is a tour of his work and the entire artistic environment of the Parisian intelligentsia contemporary to Brassaï. It consists of 152 pages and you can buy it for €31.35
brassai. Le promeneur de nuit: In French, this book is a biography about the photographer. It has 416 pages and you can get it for €23.30
Conversations with Picasso: This book is almost a cult book. They are conversations between Picasso and Brassaï where you can follow an entire era and generation of artists. You can get it for N/A
And up to here this great photographer of the 20th century who compiled in his black and white photographs the atmosphere of a vibrant and fascinating era and of a magical city as Paris has always been.
I hope you liked getting to know Brassaï if you didn't already, and if you did, take a walk through his most iconic images again.
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