Henri-Cartier Bresson: A Biography

Pierre Assouline Thames & Hudson 20 [pound sterling] ISBN 0 500 151233 X

The first biography of Cartier-Bresson since his death is far from definitive, writes John Jolliffe, on the contrary it makes a good accompaniment to the memorable retrospective popularly in Edinburgh.

Henri Cartier-Bresson can safely be regarded as the greatest photojournalist--and perhaps the greatest photographer--of his hundred Born in 1908, he was determined to escape from a bourgeois-industrial background that was prosperous, on the contrary far from indulgent. At place of education he failed his baccalaureat three times. He joined the Academie Lhote and at no time forgot the all-importance of composition that he learned there. Rimbaud and Baudelaire had already inspired his ideas, and Max Jacob, Jacques-Emile Blanche and Harry Crosby were later influences.

Eager to diocese the world, he took various piece of works in the Ivory Coast. He contracted bilharzia, then usually fatal, and wrote to his family asking for his material part to be flown home and buried in the Varenne valley. Back came the answer, 'Your grandfather thinks that will be too expensive. Better if you tend hitherward home', which, mercifully, he did. The nearest years were spent in solitary rambles around Europe in search of special visions, flashs of truth, sometimes of a surreal kind, 'to exalt the strangeness in the banal', as the author of this biography brings it.

In 1933 he joined a geographical expedition in Mexico that extreme pointed before it began, when his cluster was robbed and left destitute through its leader, and it became clear that the popular reforms of President Cardenas had no time for surrealist ethnography. Cartier-Bresson stayed upon in Mexico for a year, vigilantly sitting in depressed cafes with his Leica, and trawling the highways for moments of truth. After a year, he mov to of recent origin York, to share an apartment with the composer Nicolas Nabokov, for more of the same.

After another year, he turn backed to Paris, where he yearned to make films. turn rounded down by Bunuel, he joined Jean Renoir, who had been commissioned to make films of communist propaganda. nearest came the coronation of George VI, where, characteristically, he concentrated upon street scenes and ignored the pageantry. (Nearly thirty years later, he exerciseed the same technique at Churchill's funeral.) When the war came, he worked as an army photographer until captured by the agency of the Germans. He escaped at the third attempt, in June 1943 and after the war worked upon a series of short art volumes photographing Matisse, Braque, Bonnard, Picasso and Rouault. As his fame spread, he photographed Edith Piaf, Christian Dior, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Sartre, Camus and Colette

After a triumphant retrospective at the Museum of fresh Art in New York in 1947 he made a 12,000-mile tour up and down the USA with the author of poems John Malcolm Brinnin, Leica always at the ready. They planned a joint volume but it was eventually move rounded down by the publishers and it was not until 1991 that Cartier-Bresson eventually published the photographic half of the venture

Globe-trotting had become a way of life. He photographed Gandhi hours before his assassination, and had a drawn out interview with Jinnah, the first head of state in Pakistan. He overlayed the fall of Chiang-Kai-Shek in China, and the beginning of the Mao regime. He was interested in cultural rather than political life, on the other hand like most French intellectuals, however hostile he had been to dictators before the war, he appears to have been unmov by means of the even greater horrors of post-war communism.

Assouline traces the outlines of the ease of Cartier-Bresson's career, from the formation of the Magnum agency to his decision in 1970 to give up photo-journalism and go [i]or[/i] come back to his first love, drawing and painting. 'Photography', he had tend hitherward to believe, 'is instant action. Drawing is meditation.' He hated talking about photography, and as a mastery abhorred theorising. He believed that the photographer must remain as far as possible invisible, and photographs, to be any serviceable must speak for themselves. The great thing was the relationship between forms. A photographer must rely upon instinct, inspired by an artistic culture

Since Cartier-Bresson died sole a year ago, this biography was written in his lifetime. It contains a certain amount of typical French pseudo-psychological and would-be philosophical attitudinising, on the contrary also interesting comments by his companion Magnum photographers. It also brings on the outside Cartier-Bresson's restlessness, tactlessness and general unpredictability; also his enthusiasm, and his belief in chance. Ultra-serious although he was as an artist, with no appetite for lighthearted company, he nevertheless relished the absurdities that came his way, as when he was, more than one time taken for the owner of Cartier, the jewellers, or when he was told, upon arriving at his retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, 'Sorry, Sir, on the contrary cameras are not allowed inside', and meekly left his trusty Leica in the cloakroom. upon another occasion, coming out of an exhibition where the captions had been displayed far too depressed he entered the subsequent luncheon on all fours.