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| Andre Kertesz
     
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Hardcover
272 pages
Princeton University Press
Published 2005
Amazon.com
Hungarian photographer André Kertész eventually became famous for his wryly poetic images of everyday life. But achieving that distinction was a long slog, and Kertész--who emigrated to Paris in 1925 and New York in 1936--struggled for decades in near-obscurity and despair. Andre Kertész traces the artist's career with an engaging text and 250 exquisitely reproduced black-and-white photographs that span his long career. Throughout, he used his camera to create a visual diary of his life—haunting images suffused with a loner's sensibility. As a young man imbued with the romantic ideals of Hungarian nationalism, he photographed his handsome brother Jeno as Icarus, his exultant body silhouetted against the sky. Unable to find work after returning from the battlefields of World War I, Kertész tried his luck in Paris. It was the best move of his life. The City of Light was hungry for photographers to fill the new illustrated magazines. Avant-garde painters and sculptors opened up a new world of experimentation that prompted Kertész to photograph a series of female nudes seen in a funhouse mirror. And the new, lightweight Leica camera enabled him to snap scenes on the sly—a bum inspecting his toes on the banks of the Seine or a legless flower seller trying to tempt a passerby.
After marrying his Hungarian girlfriend, he sailed to New York, lured by the promise of steady work as a fashion photographer and a climate more hospitable to a Jewish artist. But the agency job didn't suit him, and his emotional style had little appeal for American magazines. In photographs like "Lost Cloud"--a tiny white puff suspended next to the impersonal face of a skyscraper--he mirrored his own sense of dislocation. In succeeding years, he would make classic photographs of the city, including "Washington Square," an elegant aerial view of a lone pedestrian in a snowy landscape of bare branches and benches. Major recognition finally came in the early 1960s, when Kertész was in his late sixties. Fortunately, he lived and worked for twenty more years, basking in the newly exalted status of art photography. Andre Kertész serves as the catalog for an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (through May 15, 2005) that travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (June 12-Sept. 5, 2005). —Cathy Curtis
Joanna Shaw-Eagle, The Washington Times
"One of the great romantic photographers of the 20th century, Andre Kertesz, finally receives his due".
Review
An excellent catalog that provides an unusually illuminating biography of the artist.
Review
Kertész always insisted, only somewhat disingenuously, that he was, as he called it, an 'amateur.' And so he was in a way. Not in the sense of the unskilled or unprofessional hack, but in the root sense of the word, as someone who does what he does not for fame and fortune, but for love. . . . What he tried to maintain in his art was, as curator Sarah Greenough points out . . . a kind of artistic virginity. Kertész's genius was his passion, his romanticism, his knack for seeing something fresh, as if it had never been looked at, at least not quite that way, before.
Sheldon Kirshner, The Canadian Jewish News
" he is memorialized in a bright coffee-table book brimming with stark, strong, photographs of cityscapes and people".
Sheldon Kirshner, Canadian Jewish News
"...memorialized in a bright coffee-table book brimming with stark, strong photographs of cityscapes and people".
Photo Life
"Andre Kertesz, one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century, created poetic images".
Book Description
In a career that spanned much of the twentieth century, Hungarian-born photographer André Kertész (1894-1985) created deceptively simple yet compelling and poetic photographs. This book presents approximately 120 of these striking images as well as previously unpublished archival material that sheds important light on the artist and his work.
Like the exhibition it accompanies, André Kertész takes us through Kertész's years in Budapest, Paris, and New York. Unlike other works on Kertész, it presents only vintage prints and includes several seldom seen photographs from throughout his career.
Written by renowned art historian Sarah Greenough and Kertész Foundation curator Robert Gurbo, André Kertész includes excerpts from the photographer's previously unexamined journals and correspondence--documents that prompted the authors to reexamine every period of Kertész's life and work. They reflect on their findings in essays covering each of the major phases in Kertész's career.
While the book includes examples of the artist's most important photographs, including Chez Mondrian, The Satiric Dancer, and The Eiffel Tower, it also focuses on the intensely autobiographical nature of his work. It elegantly demonstrates the ways in which Kertész injected his persona, both literally and metaphorically, into his work.
Accompanying the book's essays and exquisite tritone reproductions of his photographs are an illustrated chronology that corrects many previous errors, a comprehensive bibliography, and selections of previously unpublished writings by the photographer.
EXHIBITION SCHEDULE:
National Gallery of Art, Washington
February 6-May 15, 2005
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
June 12-September 5, 2005
From the Inside Flap
"Kertész always insisted, only somewhat disingenuously, that he was, as he called it, an 'amateur.' And so he was in a way. Not in the sense of the unskilled or unprofessional hack, but in the root sense of the word, as someone who does what he does not for fame and fortune, but for love. . . . What he tried to maintain in his art was, as curator Sarah Greenough points out . . . a kind of artistic virginity. Kertész's genius was his passion, his romanticism, his knack for seeing something fresh, as if it had never been looked at, at least not quite that way, before."--Michael O'Sullivan, The Washington Post
About the Author
Sarah Greenough is curator and head of the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art. Robert Gurbo is curator of the Kertész Foundation in New York. Sarah Kennel is research associate at the National Gallery of Art. |
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